Life would be a great deal simpler, of course, if people who want to do their duty by one another and by their common country could more easily see just what that duty may involve. The faith that can move mountains may be a common heritage, but the mountains will not be moved unless the faith can be put to work in the most effective way. We need to know, not merely what we want to do but how we can best go about doing it.

A brooding examination of this problem is contained in Arthur Goodfriend’s book, The Twisted Image . Mr. Goodfriend spent a good many years in India, as an official of the United States Information Service, and he remarks that our valiant attempt to present democracy’s argument to the people of the world’s new nations goes along a path that is all strewn with booby traps.

Democracy is engaged with Communism in a struggle for the minds of men all over the world—in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere. We believe firmly that democracy has far more to offer and that its advantages will be self-evident if we just present its case fairly, openly, and thoroughly. So far we are on solid ground; the questions we have trouble answering are the simple ones—whom do we present this case to, and how do we present it?

President Eisenhower once said that what is involved is “a contest for the beliefs, the convictions, the very innermost soul of the human being,” and when he wrote the charter for the agency which was set up to carry on this contest he instructed it “to submit evidence to peoples of other nations by means of communications techniques that the objectives and policies of the United States are in harmony with and will advance their legitimate aspirations for freedom, progress, and peace.”

This says it admirably. What bothers Mr. Goodfriend is the fact that in India we too often use the wrong arguments and address them to the wrong people. One difficulty apparently has been that although we have been most anxious to open Indian minds to American viewpoints we have not always done very well at opening our own minds to Indian viewpoints. We tend, as Mr. Goodfriend sees it, to speak to the elite, to the educated, to the relatively fortunate who already know a good deal about the modern world which India is entering and who have a fair understanding of what we are all about; doing so, we risk bypassing the immense majority altogether, even though it is that majority which may eventually determine where India goes. Trying to show that American democracy means a more abundant life, we are likely to picture ourselves as a nation of gadget-worshippers, materialists whose possessions are perhaps to be coveted but whose spiritual aspirations are wholly incomprehensible.

The United States Information Service, Mr. Goodfriend says, “aimed