ABSTRACT
When sir daniel stevenson made his endowments for chairs in international relations, he did so with a purpose wider than that of simply promoting scholarship. He also wanted scholarship to improve the world. It therefore behoves those who lecture in his honour to deliver something in the nature of an improving message. I myself have never been averse to moralizing, but it so happened that when I began to think about this lecture I was not exactly burning with a message that had to be delivered. I had only puzzles, questions, and a certain expectation that if one could only explore one’s way through those questions, something important in the way of a message would be discovered.
