At the end of the First World War, Ukraine won a shortlived independence and then it was torn apart and divided among its neighbors. For a while it seemed to have reverted to the conditions in the seventeenth century when Russia and Poland struggled for its ownership. At the end of World War Two it was reunited within the Ukrainian Soviet Republic and found its place as such in the number of the United Nations. What does the future hold in store for it? What is to be the future development of Ukraine? This depends on the future of the democratic ideals which have long been held by England, the United States and the whole of Western Christian civilization and which are now challenged by the new ideas of the Soviet Union. Perhaps never in recorded human history has the future of the world been so uncertain. The ending of the greatest war in history has not brought a feeling of peace to mankind. The power of the atom bomb, the enormous advances in science and in methods of destruction, the annihilation of space by the improvement of transportation and the increased range of rockets and other weapons, all have brought humanity to realize that in the material sphere there must be an end of war and of conflict or civilization will be irretrievably destroyed. On the other hand, the dissension in the ideals of man has reached a new high. Earlier wars between Christians and pagans, between Catholics and Protestants, have concerned a certain range of ideas but the opposing contestants have recognized many human qualities as common to both sides. For centuries there has been a slow but steady increase in recognition of the rights of the individual, of his innate right to choose his own place of residence, to think his own thoughts, to sing his own songs, and to rear his family as he would. The great despotisms and empires of the past ruthlessly eliminated large masses of the population, but they were content to demand only outer loyalty and not to interfere with the inner life of their subjects. Even the slaves could have an area of thought which they could call their own. It has remained for the twentieth century to undertake the task of subjugating the inner life of man. We may smile at the crudities of the Japanese thought police who carefully interrogated the subjects of the Emperor to see if they had any dangerous thoughts, but in more subtle ways the whole power of the Soviet Union is devoted to the creation of a culture that shall be socialist in essence and only differ in the language. Around the area which it controls there has been drawn an iron veil of silence and of secrecy. Its admirers abroad willingly accept the same restrictions and when the word filters through from Moscow, they willingly change their position, perform a complete revolution in their mode of thinking and follow the new line without criticism or debate.