THERE can be no doubt that for future generations Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt's inaugural address on entering upon his third term of office as President of the United States at Washington on January 20, will be the culminating point of the rally in defence of democracy against aggression. For those generations, indeed, it may even mark the turning of the tide in the present momentous struggle on behalf of freedom. The President, speaking both to and for the American people as their elected representative, stated that “if the spirit of America were killed, even though the nation's body and mind, constricted in an alien world, lived on, the America we know would have perished”. This was his warning in face of those who believe that democracy as a form of government and frame of life “is limited or measured by a kind of mystical and artificial fate—and that tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future, and that freedom is an ebbing tide”. While the President made no direct allusion to the part the United States is taking and will continue to take in support of the Allies, but spoke, as the occasion constrained him to do, only of the threat to American democracy, the implication of the fate which awaits mankind if America, the final stronghold of the democratic ideal, fails in preparedness, was clearly in his mind. His faith, however, in the ability of democracy to meet the onrush of “the surging wave” rests upon an assured basis. “Democracy,” he said, “is not dying”—and fortified by the experience of its resilience in the crises through which the people of the United States have passed in recent years, he declared it to be “the most unconquerable of all forms of human society”.