In a world that is sick with the diseases that breed from capitalist-imperialism, the virility of Russia may hold out the best hope for civilization.

The women's revolution may mark the first half of this century more deeply than any other social change. The emotional conflicts that confront the modern woman, the profound choices that are forced upon her, the subtle interactions in home life, in the relations of the sexes, in factory and office are here discussed lightly yet with informed wisdom.

I look forward to a future when women shall have found their sea legs and the impressive activities of the advancing women of today will seem like the earnest and awkward yet somehow promising movements of a land lubber on his first day out.

Labour, stubborn and resentful, flinging itself against a smooth wall of bland, assured conservatism, helpless to win from its opponents understanding of something which, after all, cannot be understood but must be felt; the Government, polite,

almost playful, appearing to listen and weigh and reason, and then at the end falling back on the unimpeachable argument of its huge majority.

We've hardly talked about it - but every time we got within range of a newspaper we've rushed to it hoping, without any real hope that some miracle of mercy would have descended on the Governor or someone else. It was hard to sleep through some of those nights. And everywhere we went - from Paris and Berlin to Heiligenblut in the Austrian Tyrol - people talked to us about it with horror and a complete inability to understand. This was true of people without any political feeling in the matter - casual companions in a railway compartment or in a hotel office. And now they're dead. In spite of riots and bitter resentment, I feel, in people and in myself a distinct relief that, if it had to be, it is done. Anything is better than that strain of waiting.

No single aspect of recent social development has given rise to such exaggerated hopes and fears as the entry of woman upon a wide variety of independent careers, in industry, business and the professions. Economic independence for women has now become so solidly established a fact that the debate pro and con must give way to a deliberate examination of the opportunities open to women, the various methods of reconciling the business or professional position in the family; psychological consequences of the new activities upon women; the effect upon established institutions.

Their programs (Huey P. Long and Charles Coughlin), for all their glamorous radical sound, are capitalist radicalism. For fascism is the reorganization of society by undemocratic means to maintain the capitalist system. It is a movement, first of all, of passion and prejudice, growing out of the despair of disillusioned. Impoverished people. Then comes the collusion between demagogue and big business.

It is unthinkable that a progressive and liberal journal should actually advocate any plan by which new judges are placed on our supreme tribunal who will decide cases on instructions, or who will be believed to have decided them on this basis.

It may well be that the basic conflict of the next ten years will not be between capitalism and revolution but between fascism and democracy - a struggle in which the forces of revolution must support and win the support of all the friends of democracy, while the forces of capitalism will gradually, and often unwillingly, form an alliance with the cohorts of fascism.

Franco's success would encourage the Nazis to go and do likewise in Czechoslovakia, Danzig, the Polish Corridor, or anywhere else. Defeated in Spain, Hitler would be sobered and checked. He would also be weakened by the expenditure on Franco of several hundred million dollars. If the fascists are beaten in Spain, they are weakened everywhere. The supreme test of an antifascist is not what he says but what he does for Spain.

The trial of Bukharin and his fellow oppositionists has broken about the ears of the world like the detonation of a bomb. One can hear the cracking of liberal hopes; of the dream of antifascist unity; of a whole system of revolutionary philosophy wherever democracy is threatened, the significance of the trial will be anxiously weighed.

In spite of the trials, I believe Russia is dependable; that it wants peace, and will join in any joint effort to check Hitler and Mussolini, and will also fight if necessary. Russia is still the strongest reason for hope.

We surrendered our chance to mind our business in Spain; we were too intent on keeping out of trouble and minding Chamberlain's business. We allowed democracy to be slaughtered in Spain. Today the United States is the grand arsenal for triumphant fascism. It is our business to stop providing these three aggressors with arms and the goods necessary to the manufacture of arms and the conduct of war.

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of democracy. We have not gone to war, and no excuse exists for wartime hysteria. Neither Communists nor even (German-American) Bundists are enemy agents. They deserve to be watched but not to be persecuted. The real danger is that general detestation of Communists and Bundists will lead to acts of outright repression supported not only by reactionaries but by disgusted liberals. Democracy was not invented as a luxury to be indulged in only in times of calm and stability. It is a pliable, tough-fibered technique especially useful when times are hard. Only a weak and distrustful American could today advocate measures of repression and coercion, or encourage a mood of panic. Now is the time to demonstrate the resilience of our institutions. Now is the time to deal with dissent calmly and with full respect for its rights.

At what moment does it become necessary to limit the freedom of everyone in order to suppress the danger lurking in a disloyal handful. The moment for drastic repression has not arrived, and the task of liberals in America is difficult but clear. They must fight to preserve the democratic safeguards contained in the Bill of Rights, while applying to Nazis and their supporters the equally democratic methods of exposure, counter-propaganda, and justified legal attack. Otherwise the Nazi invasion of Norway is likely to end in a victory for Martin Dies in America.

Before its total, uncompromising demands are laid upon them, the people of America must learn that this war is their war; that they cannot dodge it or buy their way out of it; that they must fight it because fighting is the only alternative to

surrender.

It is a rather terrible thing that liberals should now be the spokesmen for a jittery program which, if it means anything, can only be interpreted to mean no criticism of the Administration except from us. In ten years or less it won't be the people you want to suppress now who will be suppressed and stay suppressed by your theory; it will be yourselves along with many others, unless, indeed, you want to go farther than I think you do in support of a Roosevelt totalitarianism. Don't forget that neither Roosevelt nor anybody else is immortal. The principles once established are apt to outlive men.

It is one thing to expound high principles in print week by week. It is another to put them into practice day by day. And we who work with Freda Kirchwey think it relevant to depose and say that her liberalism begins at home. As editor-in-chief she has had the wisdom and courage to establish a genuine working democracy of which the tone and temper are set by her own respect for other individuals and their opinions, her humor, and her sense of fair play. As employer her sympathy and understanding for every human problem have won for her the freely given loyalty and friendship of every worker in the shop. In The Nation world liberty, equality, and fraternity, the four freedoms, collective security, and the union shop prevail. We who work in it find it good. We recommend it to the larger world, and on this, the twenty-fifth anniversary of her connection with The Nation we salute Freda Kirchwey as editor and as human being.

We assume that he is charging The Nation with a bias in favor of Russia and of communism. We suppose he considers that to be our "line." We suppose he is charging us with ignoring, out of "expediency," the bad behavior of the Soviet Union; of failing out of policy to denounce the Soviet power for suppressing "small, weak states". We can only answer quite flatly that he is wrong. We say what we believe. What we believe is very different from what Mr. Fischer believes.

We believe Russian policy is primarily a security policy, not an imperialist one; it can become dangerous to the world, therefore, only if Russia decides that the other major powers are plotting against it. It would be dishonest to pretend that we think Russia's foreign policy is as great a threat to the basic purpose of destroying fascism and its political and economic roots as is the foreign policy of Britain and the United States.

The bomb that hurried Russia into Far Eastern war a week ahead of schedule and drove Japan to surrender has accomplished the specific job for which it was created. From the point of view of military strategy, $2,000,000,000 (the cost of the bomb and the cost of nine days of war) was never better spent. The suffering, the wholesale slaughter it entailed, have been outweighed by its spectacular success; Allied leaders can rightly claim that the loss of life on both sides would have been many times greater if the atomic bomb had not been used and Japan had gone on fighting. There is no answer to this argument. The danger is that it will encourage those in power to assume that, once accepted as valid, the argument can be applied equally well in the future. If that assumption should be permitted, the chance of saving civilization - perhaps the world itself - from destruction is a remote one.

The Nation celebrates its Eighty-fifth Anniversary in a sober mood. Today only one subject is important - the possibility of averting a general war which would wipe out, impartially, the institutions of civilized life and the forces that threaten them this symposium is presented as a positive contribution to the broadening of the discussion of peace or war in the knowledge that for all nations the issue is survival.