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What history demands of us is that we share the moral adventure of mankind with a will to create not only security but solidarity among the peoples of the earth. If we are ever to realize the dream of world order of which you write, it will not be by such abject and sterile conclusions as you imply, but by daring to assert, as the presuppositions of that order, the great claims of the U.N. Charter: "To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all."
The saddest note of the Essay was the "catchall comment," "Sorry about that." I am sorry about this Essay.
BISHOP JOHN WESLEY LORD The Methodist Church Washington, B.C.
Sir: TIME'S Essay has booted one of the great hoaxes of our time on a journey that will carry it for another decade at least! The "Norwegian statistician" and the "14,531 wars" calculated by the computer all stem back to the Norman Cousins fantasy that appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Dec. 13, 1953. Others who passed along the story as fact include the Military Review, An Cosantoir (the Irish defense journal), the Canadian Army Journal and U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings.
BROWNLEE HAYDON Santa Monica, Calif.
Pope Paul Sir: Your piece on Pope Paul is a witness that the winds of freedom are blowing strong. For a layman to write such a penetrating and yet objective analysis of such a baffling personality is symbolic of the new day.
RUSSELL T. HITT Editor Eternity Philadelphia
Sir: As a seminarian caught in the tide of renewal, and in keeping with the progressive tenets of conscientious freedom, I congratulate you on a job well done. To delve into a subject as intricate as the papacy and produce a masterpiece of objectivity demands recognition.
JOHN VIGILANTI Pearl River, N.Y.
Sir: What a superb profile of the antithetical influences that constitute this enigmatic leader. Like Johnson, the Pope succeeds a charismatic figure; hence accurate perspective on his administration's impact is clouded. Yet, from your story, one suspects his subtle success. He is the point counterpoint, synthesizing the diversities in the Catholic world.
ELEANORE J. SEGRETTA Troy, N.Y.
Zoology & American Art Sir: Congratulations on your perceptive look at American Art and at that unique ambiguity of American imagination, the fusing of the commonplace with the transcendental [Sept. 24]. But Barker, Canaday, Larkin, and other trained and untrained eyes see a tame fox in the Bingham painting, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri.
JOSEPH G. KNAPP St. Louis
Sir: Could not Bingham distinguish a cat from a bear? Cannot TIME recognize a cat? Perhaps I'm in the wrong field?
HELEN DUNLAP Department of Zoology University of Washington Seattle
> In his exhaustive study of Bingham, John Francis McDermott says it's a bear cub, "not a cat, not a fox, but plain for all with eyes to see, a bear cub brought down from the mountains."
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