Mr. Bok's Balloon

Edward W. Bok's offer of $100,000 to the person or organization offering a practical plan for world peace took immediate hold on the imagination. Before the policy committee appointed by Mr. Bok (TIME, July 9) could draw up the rules of the contest, several hundred plans had been submitted. The committee, whose headquarters are at 342 Madison Avenue, Manhattan, announced that all these plans would be returned to their originators until the conditions of submission had been drawn up and published.

Meanwhile Mr. Bok deposited $100,000 in securities with the Garvin Trust Company of Philadelphia. Also, the Policy Committee has invited the cooperation of several organizations, who will broadcast the conditions of the contest and, when finally a plan is selected, will have their members vote for or against the chosen plan, as a test of public sentiment.

The plans submitted immediately after the contest was announced were chiefly of the ready-made variety; i. e., plans which people with specific cure-alls for the world's ills have been advocating for some time. The Policy Committee made public none of the plans, but some of the authors of plans were not so modest.

Among the plans published were 1) to buy peace by having the Government cancel its debts and make foreign loans on condition that the favored governments destroy all war materials, 2) to deprive Congress of power to raise funds for war, to abolish the Army and Navy, and to make it illegal for any nation to prepare, declare or carry on warfare, 3) to make public property of "oil, minerals, trade and territory " which changed hands in the late war (this plan was proposed editorially by The New York Call (Labor), which added: "We will never get this through the heads of the Senators, but we hope to have it understood by the masses in time."