This is a great deal. It was not too much for the Soviet Republics to promise, and to begin to bring, to Kalmucks and Tartars and Georgians; it is more than we have brought to our own disinherited in the South, in mining towns, in the fruitful valleys of California. Our partial failure is a disgrace, but not a disaster; our success, though incomplete, is important. For we have carried forward in the light of the other great freedom which Communism has had to sacrifice, which is freedom from fear. All the specific freedoms--to think, to utter, to believe, to act, are encompassed in this freedom from fear. Our basic disagreement with Communism is the same as our attack on nazi-fascism--both are based on illegitimate power (not power delegated or given, not power with the consent of the governed): hence both live on domination; on their capacity to instil fear. The war will prove how far this fear penetrated in Russia and in Germany, and how much longer it will be the instrument of coercion in either country. The President's freedoms are a wide promise to the people of the world--a promise made, like Woodrow Wilson's promises, before entering any agreement with any foreign power. Into the Atlantic Charter, Mr. Roosevelt also injected his basic domestic policies and, by some astute horsetrading managed to make them _theoretically_ the basis for international agreement. This point promises improved labor standards, economic adjustment, and social security throughout the world. Improvement, adjustment, security--they are not absolutes; freedom from want is, in effect, security; any reasonable adjustment between owners and workers will be an improvement in most countries. But the principle behind the labor point is as clear as the inspiration of the points on raw materials and freedom: it is that wars are caused by the miseries of peoples; when the people rule, they will prevent wars unless their miseries are acute; if they are not in dire want, if they have a chance to work, if they are free of coercion and threat, they will not make war--nor will they fall under the hand of the tyrant and the demagogue. In plain practical statesmanship, Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill apologized for Versailles, which denied Germany access to raw materials and prevented improvement in labor standards and drove millions of Europeans into want and fear; and at the same time they acknowledged the connection between high diplomacy and the food and shelter and comforts of the citizen. The eight points reiterate some of the fourteen; they withdraw from others; but the new thing is all American, it is the injection of the rights of the common man into an international document. But there the Atlantic Charter ends. As an instrument of propaganda and as a basis of making war and peace, it was outlawed by events; it is forgotten. _What Is Lacking_