How Much Does Freedom Matter?

THE Atlantic FOUNDED IN 1857

by Daniel P. Moynihan

At some point in the early hours, presumedly, of the week of April 20, 1975, the first slogan of the new era of peace appeared on the walls of an eating club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “THE WAR,”it proclaimed in the neoTogliatti style of the region, black on red brick, “Is NOT OVER.”

And yet it is, and its aftermath commences now to engage us. Promptly, there has arisen a debate over the reliability of American commitments, variously described, to other nations. For the third quarter of the twentieth century was, in truth, characterized by all manner of American-initiated military alliances and a not less considerable profusion of alliances for economic and social progress. As these commitments have not always produced results either of security or of progress, the question arises as to how good such commitments may be.

It is not, however, too soon to ask: How willing is the United States any longer to make such commitments? Clearly, certain necessities impose themselves here. Supposedly the nation will remain resolute in that range of concerns that touch directly on security interests, or are thought to do so. Widening and deepening the Rio Grande, for example. But what of the far larger sense of our role in the world that prompted an American President to declare, in his inaugural address:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

Clearly, a statesman in any way sensible of what has gone on in the almost fifteen years since would not be likely to make such a statement in public; but would any think in such ways? Would any seek to convey such an impression through a subtlety of language, a nuance of reference? How much does freedom matter to us? Not only our own, but that of others? Not only among nations, but within nations? Does democracy, other than American democracy, much matter to us anymore?

These are thoughts an American ambassador to India unavoidably brings home after some time in the world’s largest democracy, observing from a distance the ways of the world’s second largest— unavoidably, because to have lived in India as a representative of the United States is to have been surrounded and suffused with evidence of an extraordinary American commitment to that nation, made at the time of independence, and based almost wholly on the fact that India was a democracy. No strategic interest took us there. No economic interest. No interest of consanguinity or coreligiosity. No cultural ties; at most a flickering recollection that a German professor had established that our languages are somehow related.

There were, in truth, some serious connections, but few knew about them. For example, the first Indian rebellion against the British was organized in California in 1913, among Sikh immigrants, with a Stanford professor appropriately involved. But even there the influence went from us to them, rather than the other direction. No: in 1947 the most the Indians could claim to have done for us was to have occasioned Columbus’ discovery, and to have provided the designation Brahmin for the elders of Boston. And yet, unhesitantly—I believe the term is warranted—we undertook to provide India economic support in very large amounts, and military support also, because it was a democracy.

It was impossible for anyone living there in the final years of the Vietnam agony not to see that our relation to India was in ways the reverse of the Vietnam coin. We provided some economic assistance to South Vietnam, a prosperous enough area, and enormous military aid, including our own forces. To India, a military power, we supplied relatively small amounts of military aid, but vast amounts of economic assistance. The same men did both, and for much the same reasons. How, then, if the Vietnam commitment was so terribly wrong, could the Indian commitment have been right?

A man sits in Delhi with the temperature 115 degrees at noon and thinks of such matters, especially if he had desired to see the first involvement ended, having for a long time thought it mistaken, and worse,¹ and yet wished to see the second involvement continued and strengthened. It did not take much insight to see that both were ending, nor any especial sensibility to know that things would thereafter be different.

I kept busy, but more at tmdoing things than otherwise. One legacy of our earlier involvement was a vast rupee debt owed to the United States by India, mostly for food shipments during the 1950s and 1960s. I got the greater part of it written off: the largest debt settlement in history. The Indians noticed, and took the point, I like to think, that the United States wanted a relationship of equals, which could never obtain where one party owned a third of the currency of the other. The check got into the Guinness Book of Records—World’s Largest—but the response at home was rather like that to the closing of Cam Ranh Bay—an embarrassment being put out of mind.

Another legacy of the earlier era—American suspicion and disapproval of nonalignment—was also liquidated. The Secretary of State came to New Delhi, and in a formal address said, “The United States accepts nonalignment.” But again, while the Indians noticed, the Americans did not. Were it not for Murray Marder of the Washington Post, Americans might not even have learned of it, for the press corps accompanying the Secretary was not much interested. Congress, certainly, was interested not at all. It only wanted India to go away. A veteran congressman, formerly an economics professor from Maryland, amended an appropriation for the World Bank to provide that the American representative shall automatically vote against any loan to India. (We now vote against, but do not lobby against, and so the loans go through. But still . . .) A young businessman from Texas, in his second term in Congress, got a $50 million limitation on aid to India. Before my tour was ended, a reform Democrat from Manhattan and an unreconstructed Republican from Waterloo, Iowa, joined to lead the floor debate in the House on a measure to prohibit any aid at all. Although we had scraped up a respectable sum with which to resume an aid program, the Indians, reading the signs perhaps better than I did, simply never responded to my report that we were ready to get going again.

I was saddened by all this, for I believed that the initial conception of American policy was correct. Indian democracy did represent in Asia an identifiable and credible alternative to Chinese totalitarianism. I could accept wuth no difficulty that we had exaggerated our ability to influence the outcome of this competition, but wondered at the increasing assertions, echoing the demands for military disengagement, that we should avoid peaceable entanglements too.

The essential fact of India at the present is that the Hindu nation is free of foreign rulers for the first time in a thousand years, It is free of Western rulers for the first time in centuries. And yet it is in some essentials a Western culture. The British failed to Christianize the subcontinent (even as their predecessors had failed to bring about a mass conversion to Islam), but did bring about a secular conversion without equal in history. They left behind them a unified, contiguous nation occupying the whole of the subcontinent and governing itself as an English-speaking parliamentary democracy. (The Muslim areas broke off, of course. English may yet be replaced by Hindi, but it is still the normal language of Parliament and a common speech of the capital.) Equally as a result of this invasion of ideas and of men, India was to become a secular nation and a socialist one, its economic doctrines modeled on the British collectivist tradition, of which Professor Samuel Beer has written, just as its political doctrines flow from the British liberal tradition. Now all this is something astounding: not only to have changed political forms, but to have changed economic forms as well, and to have changed language in the process. To find anything comparable in human experience, one must go back to the Christian conversion of Europe, with the emergence—a much slower process—of monarchy, feudalism, and Latin.

Such an event could scarce but attract some attention, and American policy-makers were hugely interested at first, and at some level have remained so, recognizing that the United States has a stake in the success of the second most populous nation on earth, and the largest democracy. Every President since Franklin Roosevelt has said as much, and pursued foreign policies based on principles which clearly imply such a stake. At first certain kinds of commitment seemed naturally to flow from this interest. A huge American presence formed in India, a veritable demi-Raj, devoted not to governance but to development. But it lasted only a brief time, from the mid-fifties to the midsixties. After that, our presence began to decline, and then almost disappear. Leaving India, I commented that our relations were cordial enough, but they were so thin as scarcely to exist.

How can this have happened? A nation which poured blood and treasure into the defense of mere independence in Southeast Asia, arguing a “domino theory” in which the most important end event would be the collapse of independence and democracy in India, came in the process to care very little whether either survived where India is concerned.

There is no time for niceties in this matter, and no need. There are three reasons why this happened. The first is that India did not support our efforts—as we saw them—to protect its independence, which is to say India opposed our role in the Vietnam War. The second is that India does not appear to be succeeding with respect to its influence in the world generally. When it first became the world’s largest democracy, it seemed an ornament to that calling. Increasingly of late, it seems something less. While a political succes—semdash;it remains independent, it remains a democracy India has scarcely been an economic success.

Elites have lost wars before without losing their nerve, generally by blaming others, or somehow eliding the fact of failure.

And the third reason flows from the preceding two. This is the failure of nerve of the interconnected elites which shaped postwar American foreign policy around the matching themes of the military containment of Communist expansion and the economic development of the noncommunist world—a failure of nerve, preceded by a failure of specific undertakings: the failure of arms, the failure to receive support from regimes the arms were intended to defend; the failure of development, the failure of the effort to aid development to be seen as supportive rather than exploitative. (How many nations still have a Peace Corps—a program for sending young men and women abroad, launched at the same time and in the same spirit and by the same Administration that sent advisers to Vietnam?)

These have all, of course, been relative failures in the context of a generally successful policy. The Communist borders are about where they were in 1948, with but few exceptions; the economies of the noncommunist world range from the spectacularly successful to the merely marginally so, with but few instances of stagnation or actual decline, and the latter, in truth, more likely to involve nations such as Burma, where there has been little American influence, rather than India, where there has been considerable.

The fact that one could make a fairly positive case for our performance in recent decades is nothing alongside the fact that the will to do so has so much faltered. There has been a failure of nerve among those whose will is, or was, indispensable to a successful assertion of this kind, an assertion which in the past produced a mandate to do pretty much whatever seemed best in pursuit of what was evidently on balance a successful and honorable policy. The elites who made that policy either no longer think it successful or no longer think it honorable, or in any event no longer think it can be successfully defended. They have been effectively silenced. They have not been displaced, however. In the main, the elites who could shape American foreign policy, and did so in the decades after World War II, are still in place. But they are mostly immobilized. And so if one asks, “How much does freedom matter to the United States today?" those in a position to answer for the most part do not do so. Clearly this could constitute an accommodation to totalitarianism without precedent in our history.

I wish here to make a distinction between necessity and choice in dealing with the totalitarian world. Nuclear destruction is the great danger facing mankind, and will remain so certainly through our time. This has necessitated the compromises and accommodations—and they have come from both directions, for nothing was possible until the totalitarian powers came to share our view of the primacy of danger—which we know as détente, and which are an outstanding achievement of American diplomacy in this age. My concern is not with this newest realm of necessity, but rather with the area of choice. We have for a long while been quietly moving away from a posture in the world in which we chose freedom, and saw ourselves as its natural ally and defender. But this was at first a barely perceptible process of disengagement. More recently, there has been a sudden and definitive shift. It has been rather like a great sailing ship coming about. The boom, hauled and tugged, moves slowly, resistingly at first, when with an abandoned sweep it hurtles across the keel line. The ship lurches, settles, and then, as if there had never been another direction, moves forward on the opposite tack. Those who were tugging knew what to expect, even if they may have doubted for a moment their ultimate success. Those who ducked are still on deck. The ship moves on, oblivious of its past, an affair henceforth of logs and courts of enquiry.

To talk today of keeping commitments necessarily raises the question of who made what commitments and how. And by whose leave?

How has this happened? The answer, obvious if painful, is that in a contest of arms, we lost. We were not defeated, but we withdrew in a situation where not to win was to lose. In the long history of the Republic, this had never before happened to us. Moreover, we need not have lost in the sense that we did not have to fight. We chose to. The “we" in this sense refers in the first instance to the network of interconnected elites, supported by a not uninformed but essentially permissive public opinion, which accorded the greatest leeway to these elites to choose how an agreed-upon foreign policy should be pursued.

One risks vagueness to use the term “elites" without a detailed accounting, and yet in this case—those fifteen to twenty years of American life—there was a singular concreteness to the notion that this particular aspect of national policy was the province of an identifiable group of persons who knew one another, largely agreed with one another, presided over a variety of informal and not so informal procedures for co-opting new members, and exercised the mandate they had been accorded by informed public opinion and major power centers to conduct foreign policy. In those years there was much talk of “the Establishment.”and for such purposes, there surely was one. As was only proper, New York was its capital, law and finance its primary occupations. But there was the closest connection and cooperation with the great universities of the land, and with the media. These channels kept it in touch with other centers of power in the nation, and for all the disputation, a substantially bipartisan consensus foreign policy was pursued. As the term “elite" or “Establishment" imparts a conservative cast, it needs to be emphasized that this elite was in most respects liberal, and in nothing more so than its concern for liberal values abroad, its concern preeminently for freedom as it understood freedom.

At the grave risk of being misunderstood and coming to wish I had not tried, I shall try nonetheless to make a point here which appears to be essential to an understanding of where we are now, and where we are likely to be heading. Writing at the time, William Pfaff described Vietnam as “American liberalism’s war.”Not all liberals by any means: as early as 1962. David Riesman and Nathan Glazer had started a “Committee of Correspondence” to raise questions as to what was going on, while Benjamin V. Cohen was speaking in private of “the Top Secret War.”But most liberals. Now is this really a dark and threatening misdeed, much to be concealed? Or is it rather an historical fact which is indispensable to a compassionate understanding of what happened and a sufficient reconciliation with it all? Decent men undertook this cause, and decent men and women supported it.

Anthony Lewis puts it that “the early American decisions on Indochina can be regarded as blundering efforts to do good.”and that about says it.

It is perhaps common in the world for individuals (and nations?) to suffer for their noble qualities more than for their ignoble ones. For nobility is an occasion for pride, the most treacherous of sentiments. Pride led us into that morass in near Faustian defiance of the Second Law of War as laid down by Montgomery of Aiamein: “Never send troops to the mainland of Asia" (the first Law being. “Never march on Moscow”). Pride made it impossible to accept that it was not going to succeed, a fact that was abundantly clear by, say, 1966. And so a group that had never known defeat entered a long dark tunnel, at the end of which no light appeared, and in the course of which the group itself all but vanished.

This too was an act of pride, or if you will, of honor. Elites have lost wars before without losing their nerve, generally by blaming others, or somehow eliding the fact of failure. There are exceptions. Some who had more than their share in the decision go about saving that they were only carrying out orders. Others, equally in evidence at the time, have succumbed to a form of childhood amnesia, to use Freud’s term, a repression brought about by the “psychic forces of loathing, shame, and moral and aesthetic ideal demands.” The adult dare not know what the child thought and did. But these are exceptions. In general, the American foreign policy establishment has not done this. It chose not to because, as I believe, it was and is superior in honesty and in intelligence to most such congeries of talent and position that have exercised their brief or prolonged authority in the affairs of the world.

But this does not account wholly for the silence. Another event intervened. In the face of mounting failure of policy abroad, support for it collapsed at home. Not a total collapse; not for a very long time at least. Rather, it was a most selective event, and it occurred where it was least expected. The foreign policy elites, thinking themselves perhaps a shade more liberal, more advanced in their views than possibly they were, were more than alert to thunder on the right. At times they seemed almost to long for it, as if it would have a confirming effect on the liberalism of those being attacked. And in truth, something of this sort occurred in the course of the Korean War. But not this time. In the case of Vietnam, opposition appeared instead on the left, and it appeared in precisely those institutions and settings in which the policy being attacked had originally been conceived. Probably most important, it appeared in the universities where, along with much principled and reasoned opposition, there occurred a minority response that was almost a caricature—fashioned with near infantile cunning to be a devastating, homegrown caricature—of just that totalitarian mentality against which the United States found itself arrayed abroad. Before the decade was out, the Viet Cong flag would fly from the Washington headquarters of the Peace Corps.

It is not necessary to the argument being made here that one agree or disagree with the harsh charges made against American leaders during this period. Someone such as I, who does not agree, is forced nonetheless to grant that a great many men one had thought of as good acted in ways unmistakably bad; that men one thought of as sane acted in ways that were not sane. In particular, and unforgivably, the American government, after a time, commenced to lie and to conceal. This deceit was especially devastating in the relations of the foreign policy elite to its own institutions, and the cadres that had been conducting foreign policy for so long, and had for so long successfully defended themselves from outside attack, now found themselves attacked from the inside, and proved defenseless. “Defending liberty” came to be redefined as “killing babies.”In time not only the morality of the actions was called into question, but the legality as well. To talk today of keeping commitments necessarily raises the question of who made what commitments and how. And with what right? And by whose leave? And with whose knowledge? To repeat, one may see these events in quite different ways—as a merely incremental extension of previously extended presidential powers, or as wholesale subversion of the Constitution—and still agree that it was the charges coming where they did and from whom they did that had the greatest unsettling effect.

William Schneider, in a remarkably informative analysis of survey data, notes that in the aftermath of the 1960s, the welleducated classes of the nation have become singularly ideological in their views of foreign policy, and that among the college-educated, an extraordinary cleavage in ideological opinion has opened between young and old. He writes:

Working-class Americans have tended to see the entire generational conflict of the last decade as a war between the upper middle class and its children — and they were right.

The consensus among the college-educated, which supported postwar foreign policy, has “disintegrated,” he continues:

The fallout from the Vietnam war among liberals has taken the form of anti-militarism—opposition to defense spending and pressure for military disengagement—while the effect on their partners in the great antiwar coalition, the poor and the poorly-educated, has been more fundamental—mistrust of leaders on such issues as aid and hostility toward all international involvement.

Now of course this coalition was not allinclusive. The American labor movement’s leaders, in part perhaps because they have not encountered such generational conflict, have not wavered in their support of the libertarian commitment implicit in our postwar policy. Were President Kennedy to return, they—many of them—would wish him to sound that very trumpet once again. But few others would. The American Catholic hierarchy, for example, once so militant in such matters, is silent now. To use a medical analogy, it seems very much a case of sympathetic silence, for those to whom they looked, the core elite, are most silent of all.

And this may be the most devastating loss. For to strip our past of glory is no great loss, but to deny it honor is devastating. A generation or two hence, historians will perhaps tell us what President Kennedy was talking about; but if those who were part of that history decline now to defend what is defensible about it, then our time will know no such defense. As Christians believe in the immortality of the soul, so social scientists profess the “circulation of elites,” and there is no need to despair of new circles moving into one another’s orbits and recreating a network of influence and opinion which can give stability and coherence to American foreign policy. But one cannot conceive that any consensus likely to emerge in the future would have anything like the commitment to freedom abroad comparable to that of the past. What there will be instead is freedom from American involvement.

If one thinks of Indochina, the case surely can be made that freedom from American involvement is no necessary loss. It all comes down to that infantry captain who in 1966 said of a village that it was necessary to destroy it in order to save it. We don’t And much freedom in the world anyway. What: fifteen countries? Thirty? And unless I am altogether misled, there has been a sea change in our understanding of what it is we represent to the world. We commence to see the liberty of which President Kennedy spoke—mindlessly maybe, but with conviction—as a social arrangement which may or may not obtain in the United States and a few such nations, but which has no necessary relevance to any other place. It may command our loyalty, as Christianity once did for most of us; but in no wise are we warranted in proselytizing and propagandizing, for who can be sure what is best?

Fair enough. But it is useful to be clear that when the heirs of a fighting creed commence to talk in such manner, there has been a change. For the better, some wall say. Others will say otherwise. But when crusades come to an end, a change has occurred.

Solely as an exercise, let us suppose that India were to become involved in a military contest, open or indirect, with its great neighbor to the east. When this happened in 1962, the Indians came instantly to us, asking for help, and just as instantly help was provided. In a farewell address on leaving India in 1963, Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith took note of America’s unbending determination to continue that military support, speculating that the Chinese had invaded India (a point itself since disputed) because the Indian economy was proving too successful, and that Chinese communism stood to suffer by comparison. What in such circumstances would the United States do today? Nothing. Or next to nothing. Somewhere in that range of options.

We would have to do some talking to ourselves. Many voices, perhaps a majority of those likely to be heard, would explain that no one could clearly state where the interests of the people of India lay. The present regime, it would be said, is corrupt and inefficient. What, it would be asked, does democracy mean to a starving man? The masses, it would be said, are ruled by an upper-caste clique, an exploitative class of landowning and capitalist families, with here and there the token untouchable. This clique, it would be said, even speaks a foreign language, so it is cut off from the people of India. The ruling party, it would be pondered, has never once attained a majority in a nationwide election, and this despite widespread corruption, based on levies exacted from capitalist interests, a fact attested to by sources of unimpeachably anticommunist sentiment. In consequence of exploitation and corruption, the masses of India live lives of undescribable suffering and unrelieved despair. It is little wonder, it would be hinted, that they secretly identify with those they know come from a society where, whatever else may be, every family is guaranteed food and clothing, shelter, medical care, and education.

Others would speak more pragmatically. They would point out that we fought in Vietnam, as we thought, to preserve the freedom of such as India, and got precious little support for doing so. Indeed, got little but abuse. Where we have been involved in the defense of other free societies, such as that of Israel, India has hardly been with us. We have helped with economic aid, more than to any other nation; we have been available for advice and assistance concerning matters which on the record we know something about. Growing food, for example. But India of late has been scornful of American involvement in any of these areas. All it has managed to do is preserve a democracy. Again, all this is speculative, and yet again, we are not without data. A recent survey, “American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy 1975,” sponsored by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, found that only 16 percent of a “public” and 17 percent of a “leader” sample would favor U.S. military involvement “if Communist China attacked India.” A full 70 percent of leaders would oppose any such involvement. (Only 39 percent of the public would fight for Western Europe.)

It is the second of the two possible responses to Indian difficulties which seems to me the more serious, for it is the more honest. It speaks for the post-Vietnam mind, and for its conscience also. There are things we no longer feel can be justifiably done in defense of freedom in the world, and things no longer worth doing. The most conspicuous of the latter is that we no longer much care for those nations. whatever the nature of their regimes, which do not think much of us and cannot do much to us. There is a true loss here, for most of the new nations started out with a genuine commitment to just those principles President Kennedy said we would do anything to defend. Edward Shils writes of those splendid beginnings:

There are no new states in Asia or Africa, whether monarchies or republics, in which the elites who demanded independence did not, at the moment just prior to their success, believe that self-government and democratic government were identical . . . something like liberal democracy was generally thought to be prerequisite for the new order of things.

I believe the legacy of those brave beginnings persists, and that it is still the best hope we have that the world at large will not enter that dark totalitarian night we in the older democracies so very much feared at the time the new nations made their appearance. Yet the new nations, most of them (India being a major exception), have been none too careful of preserving liberal democracy where it existed, much less creating it where it did not. And they have been surpassingly indifferent to the fact that we have managed to preserve ours; indeed have all too readily adopted the autotherapeutic rhetoric that in America liberty is oppression and freedom confinement. There are leaders of that new world who knew better, and history is not likely to be kindly with them, for in diminishing the reputation of the American democracy, it is likely that they will have more than a little imperiled their own. They might well be measured by the warning of President Kennedy’s inaugural: “. . . we pledge,” he said, “our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny.” He said we shall not expect them always to be supporting us. “But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom. . . .” Well, we have not so found them. And they may yet find themselves—I would expect probably will find themselves—in a world in which the United States will respond with surpassing inattention to the demise of Western political institutions in nonwestern nations. We could all end up courting the favor of the totalitarians.

TO strip our past of glory is no great loss, but to deny it honor is devastating.

To wish otherwise, as surely I would do, and probably most of us would do, is scarcely to affect events. Harry C. McPherson, Jr. has written of the void of leadership across the widest spectrum of activity. This appears as a failure of individuals, but in truth, it is whole cohorts which do not respond. For institutions have collapsed along with confidence—or diminished where not collapsed; all in a torment of conscience that will not be appeased. One thinks back to Henry James’s description of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s world:

No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. . . . No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service . . . no great Universities nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow . . . no political society, no sporting class—no Epsom nor Ascot.

Leaving aside James’s possibly excessive partiality for Olde England, it is a fact that institutions formed slowly in America, and it is a further fact that such authority as they exercised has been grievously reduced in recent years. Or properly so, if one chooses that gloss. Either way, there is less than there was, and as we recall Robert Nisbet’s formulation, “freedom lives in the interstices of authority,”we sense the larger movement of which I have been discussing one aspect. James today could compile a similar list, puzzling only to those who could not see—as recently as the presidency of John F. Kennedy—a sovereign, a court, personal loyalty, a diplomatic service, great universities, a political society, a sporting class. A society, in other words, in which something as abstract as freedom could be regarded as a concrete object of foreign policy.

James instructs us further as to why in the end it doesn’t seem to have come off. We are hopelessly a culture of conscience, and usually of bad conscience, and never more so than when pointing to our sins of affluence and arrogance. This, James said, was so much the result of “the importance of the individual in the American world.” And with that American individual, the American conscience.

An Englishman, a Frenchman—a Frenchman above all judges quickly, easily, from his own social standpoint, and makes an end of it. He has not that rather chilly and isolated sense of moral responsibility which is apt to visit a New Englander in such processes. . . . American intellectual standards are vague, and Hawthorne’s countrymen are apt to hold the scales with a rather uncertain hand and a somewhat agitated conscience.

What it comes to is that life is tragic for those who are impelled by conscience to pursue objectives which can be attained only through means which conscience finds abhorrent. Whereupon that conscience turns on itself, and a fearsome thing it is when loose. Rather like the artillery of the Duke of Urbino, whose sad but instructive history it may be useful to recall. In the Holy Year 1500, Cesare Borgia, at the end of the Pope’s forces, was intent on laying siege to Camerino, and persuaded the pious and learned Duke to lend him his artillery and other forces, the better he might smite the foes of righteousness. And so Borgia marched off, but then turned and lay siege to Urbino instead. The Duke fled to exile.

A sad history indeed, and yet one from which the wrong lesson can be learned. Borgia was dead at thirty. The Duke returned to his library. The very conscience that makes us hate what we have done will very likely before long have us hating what we are not doing. Freedom concerns us, and will continue to do. But in a world of which we no longer think of ourselves as the natural leader. □