Adlai Stevenson expressed some reservations about this return. Others invoked technology and common sense. Only Walter Lippman envisioned the possibility of our having ``outlived most of what we used to regard as the program of our national purposes.''

But the most notable thing about the incantation of these ex liberals was that the one-time shibboleth of socialism was conspicuously absent.

The second specific comment was the report of Eisenhower's Commission on National Goals, titled Goals For Americans. They, perhaps, gave the pitch of their position in the preface where it was said that Eisenhower requested that the Commission be administered by the American Assembly of Columbia University, because it was non-partisan. The Commission seems to represent the viewpoint of what I would call the unconscious liberal, but not unconscious enough, to invoke the now taboo symbolism of socialism. And here again we hear the same refrain mentioned above: ``The paramount goal of the United States, set long ago, was to guard the rights of the individual, ensure his development, enlarge his opportunity.'' This group is secularist and their program tends to be technological.

But it is the need to undertake these testaments that I would submit here as symptom of the common man's malaise. And let me add Murray's new book as another symptom of it, particularly so in view of the attention Time magazine gave it when it came out recently. Father Murray goes back to the Declaration of Independence, too, though I may add, with considerably more historical perception.