All Men Are Not Yet Quakers

The Quakers, who like peace but also like to be practical, have quite understandably been worried about troubled U.S.Soviet relations. The American Friends' Service Committee, which shared the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize with its British counterpart, earnestly believes that most worldly problems can be solved by intelligent effort, backed up by good faith.

Early last year a 14-man committee of prominent Quakers began a study of the cold war. They talked things over with high U.S. diplomatic officials and with such visiting Soviet bigwigs as Andrei Gromyko and Jacob Malik. Last week the Quaker proposal, a 28-page report, was delivered to Secretary of State Dean Acheson and to Soviet Ambassador Alexander S. Panyushkin.

The Quaker plan urged that the U.S. show its good intentions by 1) promoting East-West trade and ending "economic warfare," 2) working for a unified "neutral" Germany, and 3) proposing an agreement to put all atomic bomb stockpiles under United Nations seal. If carried out, this plan "would increase the likelihood of the Soviet Union's making the desired changes on its side."

The Quakers feel that by making a reality of good will among men, they can overcome even the most brutally "realistic" aspects of Communist doctrine. They concede that "a final violent conflict between the Soviet and the capitalist worlds is a basic article of faith of Russian Communism." Even so, the Quakers fondly hope that "the flexible nature of Russian Communism and the existence of certain precedents make even a fundamental change in attitude toward the non-Communist world not entirely beyond the range of possibility."

The general reaction to the plan was understandably cool. Some of the U.S. press felt that the Quakers, in their earnest search for a true realism based on the possibility of evoking the goodness in man, had been unrealistically premature. Said the New York Herald Tribune: "All men are not yet Quakers; if they were, we might more easily repose our faith in one another's virtue and good will. In the meantime, we seem fated to base our national policies on the sorrowful facts that it takes one to make a war, two to make a peace."

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