united action; but in
the troubled periods we now face, after the war, it becomes a factor of
supreme interest and of the most vital importance.

* * * * * *

_Reconstruction_ is the world's watch-word as nations rise from the
ruins a long protracted and universal war has accumulated around them.

The period of reconstruction, more than that of the war, will test our
national fibre. The problems we face are in extent, in character, in
complexity greater than at any other period of history. The strain
will be greater, for the conflict is being lifted to a higher plane,
that of ideas. And ideas are the supreme realities, the dynamic forces
that rule the world, the fulcrum that shifts the axis of the world's
civilization.

In these momentous times, the isolation of Catholics would be a
_calamity_; their participation, a _blessing_, for Church and country.
To stand aloof from the solution of the problems that stare us in the
face and insistently demand attention and solution, to confine our
efforts solely to parochial institutions and not enter into the broader
field of public life is for Catholics, at this hour, nothing short of a
calamity. The consequences of this abstention will be to limit our
action to mere protestation and often useless defence, when our
principles are assailed and our positions in danger, when a leakage,
through the social activities of others, is but too manifest. Let us
on the contrary, turn the energies we lose in mere defence to
constructive work, and our positions will be safer, and our principles
better appreciated. "_Our liberties are best defended when Catholics
throw themselves into the stream of public life_."

And does not Catholic doctrine stand essentially for constructive
forces in the social, political and economic life of a country? We
possess the foundation, the plans, the material of all true and lasting
social reconstruction. The Gospel and the natural law form the
rock-bottom foundation; the definite and unchanging principles of
morality are its structural lines; justice is as the steel girders and
charity the fast-binding cement.

"At the present day," wrote Professor G. Toniolo, the eminent Catholic
Italian economist, "the great Encyclicals of Leo XIII, which, sustained
by the common light of the Evangelical teachings of Christian
philosophy and Revelation, have illuminated all the phases of social,
civil and political knowledge in