The Post-War, World Takes Shape

In the capitals of the four great Allied powers, this week, statesmen shaped the world that will follow World War II. The discussions had gone on for weeks. They were secret, and most of what leaked out to the press was bottled by censorship.

But this much could be published: that the Governments of the U.S., the Soviet Union, China and Britain had determined to cooperate in peace as in war, to collaborate economically, to write the peace jointly and maintain it, forswearing suspicions which had kept them apart.

To the Man from Mars such a program might have seemed inevitable. But the Man from Mars is reputed to be a reasonable creature and is known to see things on Earth in their broader outlines. He could not be expected to comprehend the racial and ideological antagonisms, the irritating practical difficulties in the way.

There was, for example, the comparatively petty problem of the Baltic States --Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. It has been an open secret in England that, as an earnest of Britain's sincerity, Russia's Foreign Commissar Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov had asked for British endorsement of Russia's title to the Baltic States (which had been Russian before 1918 as well as between June 1940 and June 1941). Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was presently embarrassed by a protest from a delegation of 20 ultra-Conservative M.P.s, headed by excitable Major Victor Alexander Cazalet, whose present job is aide to Poland's General Sikorski. In the House of Commons, Wing Commander Archibald William Henry James tried to wring from the Government the assurance that no post-war territorial settlement would be made without first submitting the proposal to Parliament.

In the U.S. it was feared that a Baltic settlement would be loudly damned by the Senate, the body that repudiated Wilson's doctrine of self-determination.

Under these circumstances, such agreements as were in the making this week were within the limits of the politically expedient. Last week Secretary of State Cordell Hull handed to Russia's Ambassador Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff and China's Foreign Minister T. V. Soong similar proposals for post-war economic collaboration* based on: 1) Article IV of the Atlantic Charter, providing for equal and free access to the world's raw materials; 2) Article 7 of the Lend-Lease agreement with the United Kingdom, providing for repayment of Lend-Lease materials in such a way as "to promote mutually advantageous economic relations . . . and the betterment of world-wide economic relations."

With a firm economic basis for postwar collaboration, the Administration hopes to build a broader system of political and military cooperation. Following fervent Vice President Henry Wallace's declaration that the peace must be a "people's peace," Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles last week spoke for the Administration to the U.S. and other people. Said Sumner Welles: "This is in very truth a people's war . . . [and] it must assure the sovereign equality of peoples throughout the world. . . . The age of imperialism is ended."

*Important point: they were proposed agreements, not treaties, therefore would not need Senate ratification.

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