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The article focuses on the book "The Public Philosophy" by Walter Lippmann. Lengthy excerpts are being printed in the "Atlantic Monthly." A painting of the philosopher himself in his study decorates the cover of the same journal. A discriminating book club has adopted the work. The publisher's blurb describes it as the product of eight years of the publicist's life and thought. Clearly a major work by one of United States' most prominent and durable political thinkers has appeared. Based as it is upon a lifetime of thinking about politics by a mind of undeniable keenness, the book deserves a respectful hearing.

This article highlights the peculiarities of Herbert Croly's personality. He became the editor-in-chief. of "The New Republic". While the other editors brought with them both remarkable talents and strong beliefs, in editorial conferences Croly's were the ideas that most often prevailed. His theory of democratic 'nationalism, developed five years before in "The Promise of American Life," became the living thread of the New Republic's early policies. Croly, in fact, was the most unprepossessing of men. Small, almost gnome-like, he looked out on the world from behind a face of startling homeliness. The significance of all this is that Croly emphasized the cultural aspects of nationalism, not the political or the military. He was an early prophet of that American cultural renaissance so many intellectuals foresaw in the years before World War I.

The article focuses on the book "The United States and China, 1906-1913," by Charles Vevier. This is a book that handles with admirable deftness events of unusual complexity. The book revolves around the efforts of New York investment bankers and State Department officials in the "dollar diplomacy" era to inject "realism" into John Hay's earlier rather idealistic Open Door policy for China. As such it provides a case study for that great debate over realism and idealism in U.S. foreign policy that Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan have brought home to the generation.