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For a few hours one afternoon last week the U.S. Senate chamber reflected the feeling and temper of pre-Pearl Harbor times. Three Senators, all onetime die-hard isolationists, rose to lambaste the bill drafting 18-& 19-year-olds. They wanted to retain the clause, opposed by the Army and thrown out by a joint conference committee, requiring a year of training in the U.S. for every teen-age soldier before being sent to combat duty overseas.

Montana's Burton Wheeler sniffed an Army dictatorship; California's Hiram Johnson was disturbed about the "warlike proclivities" of Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson; North Dakota's Gerald P. Nye shouted that Japan, after five years of war, had not yet taken young men out of schools for its Army.

But other Senators, now that the election was over and the U.S. was attacking in Africa, were in no mood to listen. After the die-hards had their say, the Senate quickly passed the bill without any strings. On its first important measure since the elections, Congress had acted with statesmanlike rapidity--and a political threat to the war's prosecution was a threat no longer.

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