Two Experiences; H. Prochnow

Two Experiences ON THE TOP of a great hill, the Acropolis, in the center of· Athens, there stand the proud columns of the ruins of the Parthenon, one of the most magnificent and inspir ing architectural works man has ever created. Late one afternoon, Mrs. Prochnow and I were climb ing those long stone and gravel )_ steps that lead up to the Parthe non, iIi order to see the golden rays of the setting sun fall on those majestic ruins. A large unit of the American fleet was in Greek and Turkish waters. Two American marines on shore leave were walking with us, and .as we climbed the stairs one marine said to the other, "I sup pose the day will come when others will walk up the stone steps -' Dr. Prochnow of Evanston, Illinois, is a former professor, government official, and banker and is well known as an author and lecturer on political and economic affairs. HERBERT V. PROCHNOW to the ruins of the White House, and they will say as they look at the ruins, 'This was a great civili zation before it fell.' "

On another occasion, we went by automobile the short distance from Beirut to the little city of Byblos. This city is one of the old est in the world. There the ruins of many early civilizations are now exposed by the excavations of the archeologists. One can stand and look down through seven thou sand years of history. One civili zation was built on top of the ruins of the last. The floor of a home of one civilization may be seen only a foot above the floor of a home in a preceding civilization. There one sees the Stone Age, the civiliza tions of the Egyptians, Phoeni cians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, Arabs, Romans, Crusad ers and Turks. One after another, through seven thousand years, 707 708 THE FREEMAN December great empires and great nations rose and then fell from power. It is a sobering thought. Through the centuries great em pires have risen and fallen - Spain and Portugal in the Western Hemisphere; the Netherlands in the Far East; France in Indo China. In this generation we have witnessed the decline in power of the British empire, upon which it was said, with understandable pride, that the sun had never set.

Now another power - the United States - is striding majestically across the horizon of world affairs. Its armies, its planes, its ships, its money, its merchandise, and its in dustrial genius are moving to the remote parts of the world. In a world where two-thirds of the peo ple earn less than one· hundred dollars a year we are far richer than any nation in history has ever been. The call of economic comfort is loud. Leisure becomes more attractive than labor. Spend ing becomes more alluring than saving. Lest we forget: every great nation which has risen to power has declined. Confronted with the challenge today of major world problems, we must remain strong, and we must hold fast in our minds and hearts to those great ideals and eternal values up on which our freedom and even survival may ultimately rest. ~ IDEAS ON LIBERTY The Crisis of Social Security IT HAS BEEN WELL SAID that, while we used to suffer from social evils, we now suffer from the remedies for them. The difference is that, while in former times the social evils were gradually disappearing with the growth of wealth, the remedies we have ~ introduced are beginning to threaten the continuance of that growth of wealth on which all future improvement depends .... ~ Though we may have speeded up a little the conquest of want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness, we may in the future do worse even in that struggle when the chief dangers will come from inflation, paralyzing taxation, coercive labor unions, an ever increasing dominance of government in education, and a I social service bureaucracy with far-reaching arbitrary powers - dangers from which the individual cannot escape by his own ~ efforts and which the momentum of the overextended machinery of government is likely to increase rather than mitigate.

F. A. HA YEK, The Constitution of Liberty Mr.Mencken on GEORGEH. DOUGLAS IN 1925, Henry L. Mencken wrote to his English friend and biogra pher, Ernest Boyd, "So far as I can make out, I believe in only one thing: liberty." To be sure, Menck en believed in a number of other things as well-all quite fervently - but there can be little doubt that his ideas on liberty are among his best and most interesting contri butions to American literature. For the ,most part, too, they are as pertinent and penetrating as they were during Mencken's hey day of the 1920s. This does not mean to suggest that Mencken has been influential asa writer on liberty. Indeed, Dr. Douglas is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana. American intellectuals tend to re ject Mencken's ideas entirely be cause of their decidedly Tory coloring, and insist that he is valu able today simply as a humorist, a wit, a satirist of the American life of his own time. And, to be sure, he was a brilliant stylist who could pin down the kinks and oddities of American social life with an almost deadly precision. But the brilliance of Mencken is due in no small measure to the brilliance of his ideas, and if he is one of our best essayists - perhaps even, as Robert Frost insisted, our very best - it is because his ideas con tinue to have weight and signifi cance.