Forebodings

"The way ... to obtain an international organization is to set about its actual construction, and not merely to talk about it." So said Sumner Welles, addressing the New York Times Forum last week.

Too Little, Too Slow. In his first speech in seven months -- and one of the most thoughtful of his many able addresses -- the former Under Secretary of State began by drawing two lessons from World War I. He was sure U.S. citizens had learned one of them well -- that the question of American entry into an inter national organization must not be permitted to become a question of party politics. But he suggested that the U.S. had not learned an equally important lesson: that the chances of founding such an organization were far greater if the foundations were laid before rather than after the end of the war. Said Diplomatist Sumner Welles : "The Moscow Declaration should have been inseparably linked to an additional declaration setting up an agency, representative of all the United Nations." "Stark Imperialism." Eloquently Welles warned against further delay in setting up a council of all the United Nations: isolationism, in its earlier form, he said, is dead. But the longer a genuine, effective internationalism is put off, the more U.S. citizens will believe that a Big Four military alliance is the only hope for security. All such military alliances, he warned, sooner or later disintegrate into a grapple and grab among allies. Already responsible U.S. Government officials are talking imperialistically about keeping the bases the U.S. has leased from Britain or won by force of arms in the Pacific and Africa. The future Welles sees for the U.S., if a United Nations council is not set up in time: "Unremitting armaments building, territorial aggrandizement ... and their inevitable adjunct, stark imperialism. . . . That road leads only to the Third World War."

The Welles speech took on additional significance as there came a fresh indication that establishment of a United Nations council is far from No. 1 on the Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin agenda. This week, the Saturday Evening Post's Forrest Davis, claiming to know what was decided at Teheran, predicted: "The first move--presumably a general assembly of the United Nations to agree on the broad outline of the world society--may be expected to follow, not precede a successful Anglo-American invasion."

One day after Welles's speech, another old friend of the President spoke his forebodings about U.S. foreign policy. Said Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, addressing the National Institute of Arts and Letters in New York City: "The peace we seem to be making will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping--a peace, in brief, of factual situations, a peace without moral purpose or human intent, a peace of dicker and trade about the facts of commerce, the facts of banking, the facts of transportation, which will lead us where the treaties made by dicker and trade have always led."

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