In Old Virginia

Through the hot days in Charlottesville the campus was less tranquil than in other Julys; a new class of freshmen swarmed over it, the first class that would ever remember college as having started not in autumn but in summer. They might also remember that their first days of school coincided with a big palaver held by their elders: University of Virginia's 16th annual Institute of Public Affairs. Some freshmen might even remember a few things that were said.

For example, there was a Midwestern newspaperman, now an Under Secretary of Agriculture, who went to the Institute to speak with obvious admiration of what he had seen in England; earnestly to recommend Britain's "great determination to maintain after the war the kind of equity in distribution which the war has forced." There was an Assistant Secretary of State who pointed out how the principle of Lend-Lease could serve a world commonwealth as it is now serving the United Nations.

A man who years ago used to be in the Prussian Ministry of Justice gave a wry outline of the famous Haushofer geopolitics and observed that Haushofer's most cherished dream--of a Russian-German bloc dominating the Eurasian land mass--had failed; that by sheer luck "America and Asiatic Russia, the greatest continental powers on earth, are united. . . ." What "united" has meant so far, and what it ought to mean if power politics is not to send the freshmen children of last week's freshmen to war again, formed the burden of another professor's plea. In support of a World Government now, he brought up the example of Winston Churchill's offer of union to France in 1940, and quoted George Washington on another Union, once problematical:

"Is there a doubt whether a common government can embrace so large a sphere? Let experience solve it. To listen to mere speculation in such a case were criminal. We are authorized to hope that a proper organization of the respective subdivisions will afford a happy issue to the experiment. . . ."

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