The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, it may be thrown back for centuries.… Persecution has always succeeded, save where the heretics were too strong a party to be effectively persecuted. No reasonable person can doubt that Christianity might have been extirpated in the Roman Empire. It spread, and became predominant, because the persecutions were only occasional, lasting but a short time, and separated by long intervals of almost undisturbed propagandism. It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake.

The race problem is branching out today into so many fields that a preliminary understanding becomes necessary as to the special topic with which the present paper is concerned. Let us first make it clear negatively that the question of the classification of the human races does not come within the scope of this inquiry. The race idea should be distinguished from the race concept which is used in natural science. Furthermore, we are not concerned with the improvement of a given human population through eugenic measures. And, finally we do not intend to deal with the problem of political and social relations between the white and the colored races. When we speak of the race idea we have in mind chiefly the idea as it is used by modern creeds, of the type of National Socialism, in order to integrate a community spiritually and politically.

Scarcely two decades have passed since Lord Bryce stated that democracy is universally accepted “as the normal and natural form of government.” What the author of the American Commonwealth regarded at the end of his long life as the result of the modern development had been announced by Alexis de Tocqueville even before Bryce was born. This French historian and political philosopher, who is today classed as one of the most important thinkers of all time, characterized the whole modern political and social trend as an irresistible advance towards democracy. He was afraid that democratic equality would destroy individual liberty. Like John Stuart Mill a generation later, he too was depressed by the fear that the despotism of a brutal majority rule might be a future threat to democracy. But this fear did not change the general trend of his prophecy.

Communitarian forms of life are the basic forms in which a people lives. Only in them does man realize to the fullest his being a person—in fact it is only in communitarian forms that he grows to the status of a person. Man's fundamental mode of being is comunio, namely of persons. Such comunio materializes in family life, in friendship, in neighborhood, in religious life, in certain forms of vocational collaboration. Beside these fundamental forms man builds himself free-willed associations which do not engage his personality to its deepest and fullest extent, as e.g. trade unions, corporations, societies and associations for cultural, scientific, recreational purposes. For want of a better term we call them in contradistinction to the other forms societarian forms, in following the terminology of F. Toennies in his book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Community and Society). Both these forms develop in a people and aid in constituting a people. However, the communitarian forms are basic and therefore of greater importance for the totality of a people's life, its political institutions included.