Nature of power : civilization and foreign policy

To write or speak on our foreign relations in a way which informs, enlightens, and persuades is an achievement. The writer of this Introduction knows from long experience the difficulties of the assignment. He has spent a good many years and much mental and physical energy in discussing with his fellow citizens our relations with other peoples-the dangers from the ill-disposed, the difficult problems of our friends, the need for friends, the long painful list of effort and sacrifice required to maintain ourselves in a turbulent world which we can affect but cannot control. In sheer bulk, at least, his ex pository effort was considerable. And it is not immodest to believe that as an accompaniment and explanation of action it had some useful effect. But now, as at the time of doing, these speeches and discussions leave a sense of incompleteness, a sense of the lack of a beginning and an end.

This is not a unique complaint. It comes from every man who must speak out of and within the limits of defined respon sibility. "I look into my book," said Justice Holmes over a half century ago, "in which I keep a docket of the decisions of the full court which fall to me to write and find about a thousand cases. A thousand cases, many of them on trifling or transitory matters, to represent nearly half a lifetime. A thousand cases, when one would have liked to study to the bottom and to say his say on every question which the law ever has presented, and invent new problems which should be the test of doctrine, and then to generalize it all and write it in continuous, logical, philosophic exposition, setting forth the whole corpus, with its roots in history and its justifications of expedience real or supposed, Alas, gentlemen, that is life. . . ."