Little Men, What Now?

The war news looked better. Many men spoke of ultimate victory. After victory would come peace. But for the United Nations the problem of how to win the war had already become in part the problem of how to win the peace.

Possibly Winston Churchill, bursting with pride in the Egyptian campaign, could not resist saying in Parliament: "We mean to hold our own. ... I have not become the King's First Minister to preside at the liquidation of the British Empire" (TIME, Nov. 23). Possibly General Dwight Eisenhower could not resist saying: "The forces under my command bring with them a solemn assurance that the North African Empire shall remain French." But in both statements there were echoes of the whole sorry past that led to two World Wars in one generation. How much was that past controlling the minds of the United Nations leaders?

Now, before the world's emotions and self-interests become too snarled, there is a need for definition of peace aims in order to clarify war policies. A case could be built up for the vagueness of the Atlantic Charter, for the necessity of political double-talk during the stresses of war. But the excitements of war last week could not hide the ever-present danger that too few men and too few of the world's peoples would be consulted about the peace.

Not every person in the world, nor every nation, would be satisfied with the post-war adjustments that were coming. But every person and every nation would be affected by them. Last week, in the first rays of the sun of victory, a mixed foliage of ideas, plans, prejudices, programs, claims and counterclaims was growing throughout the world. Samples:

> King George VI, in his fourth wartime Speech from the Throne, said little more than that his Government was committed to the building of a better peacetime world at home and in the colonies.

> Richard Law, British Foreign Under Secretary, told the House of Commons: "Whatever the future of the League of Nations, we have the United Nations functioning now and ... we must work to build it up so that it will function with the same harmony when the immediate peril of war is over."

> Dr. Henryk Strasburger, Polish Minister of Finance declared: "We should like to go as far as possible toward creating a federation of Eastern and Central Europe, excepting Austria, with stabilized currency."

> Sir Frederick Whyte, discussing the Peasant Program drawn up by exiled representatives of Czecho-Slovakia, Greece, Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria, remarked: "The Program is founded on a reaffirmation of peasant proprietorship. . . . Unless the United Nations are prepared to supply capital equipment for new developments throughout the area and to back it with a new kind of trading relationship, these countries will fall back into the grip of the sole buyer... within the German economic and political orbit. . . ."

> Chiang Kai-shek told the People's Political Council: "No difficulties or sacrifices must deter us from the fulfillment of our duties as one unit of the forces of the United Nations. ... It is not for us boastfully to talk of China's right to a position of 'leadership' among the Asiatic countries. We shall rather regard it as our responsibility to treat the peoples of Asia as equals to help and support."

> Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles declared before the New York Herald Tribune forum on public affairs: "It seems to me that the first essential [of world peace] is the continuous and rapid perfecting of a relationship between the United Nations so that this military relationship may be further strengthened by the removal of all semblance of disunity or of suspicious rivalry. . . ."

> Major Krechet wrote in Moscow's Izvestia: "How will the Fascists be able to repay for the losses of thousands upon thousands of Russian families? The Hitlerites should be annihilated by the dozens, by the thousands, like rats. . . ."

> The Emir of Trans-Jordania issued a public statement: "The Senusi (secret Moslem sect) are the rightful overlords of Libya by virtue of ancestral ties and religious leadership. We Arabs never forget the national war of the Senusi against Italy. . . ."

For the U.S. and all the world the problems were great. They might be insoluble. They were not likely to be a bore.

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