Senator Muskie's Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations had just commissioned the Lou Harris organization to conduct a poll on Americans' knowledge of and confidence in their country's institutions. The results on both counts were, as WFB relates them, pretty depressing. The bulk of the hour is spent--sometimes heatedly--analyzing the poll and debating how close it comes to reality.

An unusually lucid discussion of a tangled situation. In reply to Mr. Buckley's question--"Now, if something can last between 1921 and 1968, why can't it last out the balance of the century?"--Mr. Hume gives a masterly account of the threads that came together in the late Sixties to produce the violence that led, in 1972, to Britain's suspending Stormont and assuming direct rule of Northern Ireland.

In 1972 the Nixon Administration had made an agreement to sell grain to the Soviet Union that, as WFB puts it, "Mr. Earl Butz, our Secretary of Agriculture, proudly announced [as] the largest grain deal in four thousand years." The immediate result was to help our farmers, our trade balance--and of course the Russians, in that Year of Detente. The result over the next two years had been sharp rises in our own food prices, over and above the general inflation we were suffering.

Soon after the Arab states clapped on their embargo and then boosted the price of oil by 400 per cent, WFB reminds us, President Nixon appointed William E. Simon energy czar, "and the American people were introduced to ... [this] cyclone from Wall Street who bedazzled the Congress, the bureaucracy, and the press, and got us through the winter." But oil was still $10 a barrel, and where do we go from here?

Mr. Udall, WFB begins by telling us, is running for President, and "a number of Democrats ... see in him someone who could bridge the gap between, say, the McGovern wing of the party and the Muskie-Humphrey wing." (Historical piquancy: the others whom WFB mentions as serious candidates for 1976 are Henry Jackson, George Wallace, and Lloyd Bentsen.) But the substance of the conversation is on Mr. Udall's principal preoccupations: energy and the environment.

Mr. Wurf, the leader of the fastest-growing union in the United States, answers the title question with an emphatic Yes. Mr. Buckley, citing "public figures ranging from Calvin Coolidge to Franklin Roosevelt," answers with an equally emphatic No. A heated but frequently illuminating debate that keeps returning to a recent strike by some of Baltimore's policemen after the mayor had refused any form of arbitration.