Rights and Hopes

WHY EUROPE WENT TO WAR--Vera Micheles Dean--Foreign Policy Association (25-c-).

THE WAY OUT OF WAR--Cesar Saerchinger-Macmillan (60-c-).

THE CASE FOR FEDERAL UNION--W. B. Curry--Penguin (25-c-).

THE NEW WORLD ORDER--H. G. Wells--Knopf ($1.50).

In the summer of 1916 a 43-year-old British Laborite journalist named H. N. Brailsford wrote a book called A League of Nations. His main ideas came from a struggling organization called the League of Nations Society, founded by a handful of cool-headed idealists in 1915. Compared with such Hun-hating best-sellers as James M. Beck's The Evidence in the Case, such trench life thrillers as Arthur Guy Empey's Over the Top, Brailsford's book was a commercial fizzle. But one of its readers was Woodrow Wilson (Senator Borah sent him a copy), who drew heavily on it for his 14 Points. Two years later the League's handful of supporters had grown to millions.

What equivalent program will offer man hope in World War II?

Last week in England a vast debate began. Participants were about 3,000 debating societies, cooperatives, trade unions. Invited to chime in editorially were 300 newspapers throughout the world, including Mahatma Gandhi's Young India. Also invited was Dorothy Thompson. Lead-off debater was H. G. Wells, with an article in the London Daily Herald, whose owl-faced, idealistic Reporter Ritchie Calder started the whole thing. Subject: A New Declaration of the Rights of Man.

No flash in the pan, the discussion was elaborately organized to enlist the opinions of such illustrious Britons as the Archbishop of York (Canterbury declined), George Bernard Shaw, Laborites Clement Attlee and Herbert Morrison, Harold Nicolson, J. B. S. Haldane, Novelist Rose Macaulay, Editor Basil Kingsley Martin of the New Statesman and Nation, and the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, Archibald Main. Points on which these worthies and the debaters agree will then go to a drafting committee of nine headed by Socialist Viscount John Sankey. (Pundit Wells resigned that post last week after a Herald blast at Chamberlain's and Halifax's "failures" had embarrassed his committee colleagues.) Their Declaration drafted, they will pass it along to a group of international lawyers for checking, then try to sell it to the civilized world.

Declarations and Bills of Rights are mere curiosities without a government to support them. England's debaters might have seemed to be purely academic were it not that behind all their experimental talk was a recent cluster of ingenious and hopeful .ideas for such a government. Of those ideas U. S. readers could get a fair idea from four recent books.

Obvious starting points for all four: 1) that war is international anarchy caused by unbridled nationalism; 2) that "international morality" has disappeared; 3) that all nations are partly at fault for World War II; 4) that a way out can be 'found short of violent revolution; 5) that the Allied war aims, as so far stated--to crush Hitler and protect the small countries--are considerably less than clear or inspiring. But the authors of these books find plenty of room for argument.

Why Europe Went to War, which mainly reviews immediate events leading to World War II, pleads for a new "world order," but offers no program beyond declaring the need "for a new attitude toward relations within and between nations."

Cesar Saerchinger, veteran foreign correspondent and radio commentator, thinks that to abolish war it would be enough to put teeth in Article XIX of the League of Nations Covenant; though how to do it he cannot divulge. He must be commended for his moral sentiments ("The world stands in terrible need of a spiritual revival") rather than for originality of ideas.

W. B. Curry's The Case for Federal Union, by the headmaster of one of England's leading progressive co-educational schools (The School, Dartington Hall, Totnes), is a popularization of Clarence Streit's Union Now, most famed, most concrete program for world cooperation. Geneva correspondent for ten years of the New York Times, Streit watched the collapse of the League, set out to devise a foolproof substitute. First published privately in France, brought out in the

U. S. last year, Union Now was at first respected but found "visionary." Since then the pressing need for decent war aims has conduced, even among European states men, to a more favorable view of its practicality. Union Now proposes: a Federal government, modeled on that of the U. S., of the ten "North Atlantic democracies"--the U. S., the British Commonwealth, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland. They would elect delegates per sizes of population, pool their gold, armies and navies, issue a common currency, hold the door open for dictatorships if and when reformed.

The Case for Federal Union amplifies Streit's book, answering typical objections:

> Federal Union is merely a scheme to bolster up the British Empire. Streit-Curry: the U. S. would carry far more weight in the Union's government than England (136 delegates to the British Empire's 86).

> Imperialistic monopolies would still fight 'each other. Streit-Curry : So do Ohio corporations compete with those of New Jersey.

> Lower standards of living would result from free trade. Streit-Curry: Domestic trade would have vast untapped markets in a Union of 280,000,000 citizens (900,000,000 with colonies).

> Unionists would have to struggle with five languages. Streit-Curry: Switzerland has three.

> Federation faces the insuperable obstacle of abolishing "sovereign states," chief cause of war. Streit-Curry: The original 13 U. S. sovereign states faced no less an obstacle.

Author Curry frequently quotes H. G. Wells to bolster his argument for a new world order. But this week, in The New World Order, Author Wells announced himself far to the left of Federationists. In high spirits, he disposed of World War II in a few words: it is "a stupid conflict upon secondary issues, which is delaying and preventing an overdue world adjustment." To get rid of Hitler, he snorted, "will be no more a cure for the world's ills than scraping will heal measles."

Nothing will do, declares Wells, except a social revolution, "profounder even than the revolution attempted by the Communists in Russia." That one failed, declares he, "not by its extremism but through the impatience, violence, and intolerance of its onset, through lack of foresight, and intellectual insufficiency."

Federal Unionists, scoffs Wells, are too tame, too "hopelessly optimistic." But except for Wells' more bumptious language, his "Western Revolution" (led by "a sufficient number of minds throughout the world . . .") is considerably vaguer than Clarence Streit.

Author Wells did not wait for England's great debate to draw up his own Rights of Man, which are right there in the book. "Every man without distinction of race, of colour, or of professed belief or opinions" is entitled, he declares, to: 1) security; 2) education; 3) a job he likes; 4) free trade; 5) private property; 6) freedom of travel; 7) protection against imprisonment; 8) fair trial; 9) protection against violence; 10) freedom of thought.

Challenges H. G. Wells: "Now while the guns are still thudding is the time for thought."

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