The old adage about giving a dog a bad name applies with a peculiar reverse twist to the subject of this book. "Cultural Relations" is not a bad name in itself; on the contrary, it has all the attributes of gentility and virtue. It is merely a bad name for the thing it describes. It is also---which is perhaps worse---a boring phrase. Few readers who are not familiar with the thing itself will attempt of their own choice to penetrate those pompous syllables.

All of which is particularly unfortunate because the thing these syllables designate is more important to the people of the world, and the people of the United States in particular, than almost anything else they can read about or think about at this moment in their history. The world's hope for peace, which is another way of referring to the world's hope of survival, is directly dependent upon the mutual understanding of peoples. And it is precisely the mutual understanding of peoples which the clumsy phrase, "Cultural Relations" attempts to describe.

It is not too difficult to get assent of a sort to the proposition that international relations have entirely altered as a result of technological advances in the machinery of communication. The difficulty is to make the assent mean anything. The Foreign Offices of the world continue to regard their business, and to conduct their business, as though no substantial change had taken place---as though peoples still communicated with peoples through Missions abroad and Foreign Offices at home as though the serious business of any Foreign Office were its so-called "political" affairs and its so-called "economic" affairs, with its "informational" activities treated, if they are treated at all, as a kind of administrative and operational afterthought.

It is only within the last two years that our own Department of State has had an Assistant Secretary in charge at least in theoretical charge of information policy. The general view of Foreign Office officials, whether career diplomats or men of politics, continues to be the view that the first business of Government in foreign relations is to conduct, with the traditional reticence, the traditional negotiations relating to political and economic affairs, allowing information about these activities to follow after the event and in cautiously restricted quantities. The realization that the development of modern communications has made this point of view and this practice as obsolete as the weapons of the Spanish-American War, has not really penetrated the Foreign Office mind, professional or political. Communication in the field of foreign relations---communication between a Government and its own people as well as communication between peoples ---is still regarded as something which it is safer to avoid.

Worse, it is regarded as something which it is possible to avoid. And that is the fundamental, the inexplicable error. Because the fact is that popular communication can no more be avoided in the world of modern communication facilities than the dissemination of knowledge can be avoided in the world of print and paper. Whether Governments like it or not, their people will learn of the principal problems which face them in international affairs. It is to the interest of Governments to see to it that what they learn is accurate and not inaccurate, truthful and not partisan or prejudiced. In the same way, whether Governments like it or not, people will communicate directly with each other through the innumerable channels of print, of radio, of trade, of travel, of goods, of songs, of scientific achievements, of architecture, of agricultural practices, of business methods, of works of art. What is important to all Governments---and even more important to the people of the world who hope for peace---is that the nature of the communication should be such that understanding and not misunderstanding will result; that comprehension and not prejudice or hatred will be disseminated throughout the world.

Governments which continue to conduct their foreign affairs on the theory that the only responsibility of Government as regards information about foreign affairs is the responsibility to answer press questions at conferences and to respond to press attacks where silence is no longer feasible, are practicing the kind of obscurantism which may deceive the official mind but will deceive no other. The great ventilating activity of mass communication will go forward with as little regard for their theories as the tides of the British Channel are alleged to have had for the theories of King Canute. Not even the repressive measures of totalitarian Governments can prevent the flow backward and forward of the impulses, the words, the objects, the reported actions, upon which men and women form their impressions of each other, whether as individuals or as nations. What a totalitarian radio refrains from saying may be as eloquent to the rest of the world as what it says most insistently. There is no conceivable way, short of turning back the technological clock and destroying the achievements of modern science and modern engineering, by which the great new flow of communication in the world can be interrupted or silenced.

And for Governments, particularly for democratic Governments, to blind their eyes to that fact and to assign the information function to minor officials, from whom, moreover, the actual facts are often hidden, is neither intelligent nor wise. The first Government which puts the Word at the beginning where it belongs, considering that the understanding of the people is more important than any particular negotiation or any particular arrangement, however important the negotiation or the arrangement may appear at the time, will secure to itself an advantage in the conduct of foreign affairs which will compel every other Government to follow its example. One can only hope---certainly an American can only hope---that the first nation to adapt its foreign affairs to the world of modern communication will be a nation founded upon the confidence that the people can govern themselves and of right ought to.

How, and by what changes, the foreign relations of a people should be adapted to the newly created channels of communication is not the subject of this book of Ruth McMurry's and Muna Lee's. Their purpose has been to bring together into one volume the record of the efforts of contemporary Governments to use certain aspects of their national cultures for the purposes of their foreign relations. But because the activities with which this volume deals are activities based upon a recognition, conscious or unconscious, of the facts of international communication, and because the overriding purpose of these activities, whatever incidental purposes they may from time to time have included, is to improve the mutual understanding of peoples by substituting for the artificial image of the State the human and living image of the people as themselves, this volume has a basic importance to the solution of the larger problem.

The fundamental purpose of a program of "Cultural Relations" in any country is to correct the image of that nation formed abroad by those who know it only through its soldiers or its diplomats or its men of business---through its political and military and commercial enterprise in foreign markets and in foreign places. We in this country have good reason to know how false and defamatory an image of the American people was created in the minds of the peoples of Latin America by the commercial imperialism and military interference and diplomatic condescension of the last decades of the last century and the first decades of this. We have good reason to know also what it has meant to the mutual understandings of the Western Hemisphere, to say nothing of the prestige of the United States, that the peoples of the other American Republics have been persuaded over the last twelve years that we have something more than a knowledge of investment banking, of the extraction of minerals and of the deployment of marines---that we have in fact a literature and an art and a scientific development worthy of study and respect. And we are not the only nation to improve its international standing and prestige through "Cultural Relations." It is largely in consequence of the activities of the British Council that no literate European will ever again refer to the English as a nation of shopkeepers.

The subject of this book is important, therefore, for the light it throws upon the primitive and fragmentary efforts of certain Governments to recognize the realities of the modern world and to adapt to those realities the management of their foreign affairs. The book will also have another and related usefulness to those who wish to compare the activities of other nations with our own limited beginnings in this same field. But the principal significance of Miss Lee's and Miss McMurry's book is its broader significance. It will suggest to anyone who will read it with the history of the last twenty-five years in mind that the entire problem of the conduct of foreign affairs requires---urgently requires---re-examination. Foreign Offices are no longer offices to speak for one people to another; the people can speak now for themselves. Foreign Offices are offices of international understanding, the principal duty of which is the duty to make the understanding of peoples whole and intelligible and complete. Until the practice accords with the duty the work will be inadequately done.

ARCHIBALD MACLEISH