Brave New Scanties

THE WILD FLAG (188 pp.)--E. B. White --Houghton Mifflln ($2).

E. B. White plugs federal world government with the dazed urgency of an Esperanto salesman. He has the same high purpose, the same rosy vision, the same conviction that all it needs is a try. This collection of his slick New Yorker editorials ("they were written sometimes in anger and always in haste"), will appeal mostly to readers who clearly comprehend such a touchstone as: "Meantime we will continue to believe that although a man may have to compromise with Russia he can never compromise with truth."

White (E. for Elwyn, B. for Brooks), comes equipped with a slogan: "Federalists of the world, unite!" And he waves a flag, "a wild flag, [the flower] Iris tectorum." In a Whitean dream a Chinese delegate says: "I propose all countries adopt it, so that it will be impossible for us to insult each other's flag." Lest all this seem too whimsical (Author White made his reputation as a humorist) the tough-minded reader is offered a working policy: "We propose that it shall be the policy of the United States to bring to an end the use of policy."

His practiced glibness makes even Mr. White a little uneasy. He concedes that his shimmering blueprint "will be too purely theoretical for the practicing statesman, who is faced with the grim job of operating with equipment at hand. . . ." Since practicing statesmen can do little else, this admission is perhaps fatal.

White grants that "One nation's common sense is another nation's high blood pressure." But having there stumbled within grappling distance of the world problem, shy, melancholy Author White characteristically sideslips and waves his wild flag modestly from another corner of the lot: "Somebody, we thought, should seize the halyard and run up a token banner to symbolize the world community, even if it were only a pair of scanties."

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