Unpleasant Things Research Articles

The Concept of Preparation: Some Questions about the Transfer of Systems of Government

Arecent commentator has suggested that the value to political science of looking at new states is that “one is forced to deal with the most basic questions of politics—the entire set of questions involved in the creation and maintenance of political societies.” Certainly this appears to be true time and again. One is forced to look at the largest questions to the smallest, both because they are vivid and apparent, and because they are also urgent. The basic problem of obligation—why we do things we do not want to do, and allow unpleasant things to be done to us by political leaders, or why we accept the authority of power—is for us either a matter of analysis or of sociological inquiry. Clearly it is more than that in a new state. There the question is a living one, sometimes for a large minority, sometimes for many small sections or groups. The state and the nation are not, as yet, one. Rousseau or Hobbes have come to life.

What good is grammar?

Unfortunately this criticism of grammar books and grammar teaching is occasionally justified. At times some texts and teachers do seem unduly devoted to promulgating fantastic distinctions between shall and will and to keeping whom alive by heroic efforts. If by grammar one means a multiplication of arbitrary pronouncements and faulty generalizations and an improper emphasis on the formal written language, then we surely should get rid of it at once. But actually the cure for these and many other kinds of misunderstanding about the nature of the language is not a giving up of grammar but simply the study of grammar. Grammar here, of course, means a body of generalizations about the way a language behaves based on the careful observation of innumerable instances. Certainly nobody can be harmed by a study of the facts, and conceivably one could profit from such activity. The tendency of the general public, however, is probably to see values in the study of grammar that cannot be legitimately claimed for it. Perhaps the reasoning is as follows. Teachers, nurses, doctors, and relatives point out how unpleasant things may be good for us. Grammar proved unpleasant for me in school. Therefore grammar is good for me. Though such a person will readily proclaim he knows nothing about grammar, he does have a naive faith that an acquaintance with it might have netted him a good prose style, money in the bank, a longer car, and a girl something like Marilyn Monroe in his arms. He is determined that his children are going to have pure unadulterated grammar whether they like it or not, and he is pretty sure they aren't going to like it.

The Study of History in the Light of Current Developments

I fancy it is a rather new idea to think of looking at current affairs in the light of history, at all events remote history. This point of view has not, I think, been common in England at any rate. Take people of about my own age-fifty-nine. When I was a child, growing up in London, I had the impression that history, so far as England was concerned, had really ended with the Battle of Waterloo. We had won the Battle of Waterloo, and getting out of history had been one of the rewards of our victory. One thought of history as being something rather unpleasant that happened to other people. As one grew up and became conscious of other countries, one became aware that the United States, for example, had been in history in the eighteen-sixties and that France had been in history in 1870. One knew that the Balkans were still in history, but then the Balkans were so backward: they would be still in history. But the English were manifestly out of it. It was true that in the eighteen-nineties and the first years of the present century, the French and the Southerners of the old South in the United States were conscious of being still in history, because they were conscious of unpleasant things that had happened to them in the recent past. But, on the whole, these two recently defeated peoples were exceptions in the Western world, and the attitude we then had towards history in England was, I think, the prevailing one. It was the attitude of most of continental Europe and North America. I think our expectation about our own future in the West was very accurately put by Gibbon, in a passage which he wrote, as far as I can make out, in 1781. You will find it at the end of his general observations on the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, with which he winds up The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Before he comes to the rest of his story he pauses to consider whether a catastrophe of this kind could overtake the modern Western world; and of course he concludes that this could not conceivably happen. As I have said, Gibbon was writing apparently in 1781, when England was, I think, at war with France and Spain and Holland, as well as with the Thirteen Colonies, and when the northern Powers, in their armed neutrality were what nowadays would be called non-belligerents, unfriendly towards us. This might have seemed to be rather a critical time for this country; yet at this juncture Gibbon could write:

EDITORIAL

THE following statement was received in the form of a "letter to the Editor' from Dr. Edna Miller of New York City, who commented, "What better way is there to reach pediatricians than through the medium of their new publication Pediatrics?" "Dentists are constantly informing parents and others in charge of young children as to the need for an early 'first visit with the dentist.' "Much of the irremedial damage, dentally and psychologically, is due to the pain and traumatic experience that necessarily follow the discovery of decayed teeth by the dentists, or the uncomfortable sensation of an acute dental abscess felt by a child. "When children are first seen by the dentists at the age of two and one-half or three years, and thereafter at frequent, regular intervals, the procedures are usually painless; or, if pain is unavoidable, the dentist has already impressed the child with his sincerity. He is then no longer a stranger, visited only at a moment of emergency, who does unfamiliar, unpleasant things with elaborate equipment.

THE ULTIMATE RESULT OF THE ROENTGEN TREATMENT OF CARCINOMA OF THE BREAST.

A review of the literature of carcinoma of the breast during the last year reveals but little from the pens of those operators whose experience in the use of the Roentgen ray is great enough to entitle their utterances to respect and attention. On the other hand a number of articles have appeared in the various journals which, on their face, betray ignorance and inexperience. The writer of one of these after relating a deplorable series of surgical mishaps arising during an attempt to operate on a breast which had been rayed by another operator, accuses this preliminary treatment of a number of unpleasant things and ends with a denial of the ability of the ray to produce any tissue changes whatever beyond a dermatitis, basing these sweeping assertions on an extended experience of 6 cases. Such articles as this, which is merely an example of a number of others