A Lever That Can Lift the World

by WILLARD R. ESPY

THE master problem of the world today is not Russia, or world government, or atomic energy. The master problem is still, as it has been always, the dragging poverty of two thirds of the earth’s people.

Mohammed Bey, the Egyptian fellah, makes between $12 and $20 a year; Girja Das, in India, between two cents and five cents a day; Ling See, in China, a cent and a half an hour. Asia and the Near East are a poorhouse whose inhabitants have barely enough food to support existence — far too little to do a decent day’s work. They die, on the average, at the age of twenty-five. They are without homes worthy of the name; they are incapacitated by disease and by lack of physical and moral hygiene; they are decimated by famine, pestilence, and war.

Their misery is a standing invitation to xenophobia, to social unrest, to fratricidal quarrels, to outside intervention — ultimately, perhaps, to the annihilation by atom and germ of East and West alike. Meanwhile, it is a drag on the progress of all other peoples.

A self-liquidating program which would set the East moving under its own power toward increased stability and higher living standards would raise the well-being of all the earth. Incidentally, it would be an excellent investment and stimulus for American business.

And such a program exists. There are a large number of projects and possibilities scattered about the five continents. Former War Production Board Chairman Donald Nelson, for instance, has urged the creation in China of the largest dam in the world, one that would irrigate 10 million acres and furnish twice as much electricity as was used in 1936 by all the factories and farms of Germany. Herbert Hoover has called for an irrigation scheme in Iraq that would make room for millions of new settlers. James B. Hayes, formerly of the Tennessee Valley Authority, quit his post to become Chief Engineer of a Jordan Valley Authority in Palestine that may well revitalize the Near East. An American engineering firm has undertaken, on a cold cash basis, the fantastic task of industrializing Afghanistan. Shortly before his death, Franklin D. Roosevelt urged TVA’s for the Arab world. The Indian government has approved a program which, according to New Delhi figures, could double the living standards of India’s 400 million inhabitants. There is a river flowing uselessly through uncolonized African jungles that could produce more electrical energy than the 1946 consumption of the entire United States.

Considered separately, these possibilities are exciting enough. But I cannot help wondering what would happen if the separate blueprints were combined into one master program. “Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand,” said Archimedes, “and I can lift the world.” Perhaps the lever lies closer at hand than we realize. If so, the only nation with the technical know-how and the financial and material resources to operate it is the United States. Surely the challenge is as great as any nation has ever faced; the rewards may be even greater.

Electricity for China

A united and friendly China is a cardinal aim of American foreign policy. In furtherance of that aim, for two years we used the promise of a halfbillion-dollar loan to keep the lid on China’s civil war. The effort failed, for a half a billion dollars could not by itself solve China’s poverty; and poverty is at the heart of her inner disaffections.

Multi-purpose dam projects now awaiting construction there would provide a far more effective means to the same end. They can increase the electric production of China fifteenfold within the next twenty years. Today Ling See taps but one watt of electrical energy for every 180 available to Tom Smith, American. When the projects are completed, China will produce an added 115 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year — about as much as was used in 1936 by France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom combined. To grasp faintly the immensity of this figure, reflect that one kilowatt-hour will do the work of ten men. The energy latent in the rivers of China will give her the equivalent of more than a billion slaves laboring eight hours a day, six days a week.

Hugh dams will rise on the Yangtze, the Te-TuHo and Ma-Pien-Ho, the upper Ming-Kiang and Kwan-Hsien, theTang-Lang Chuan, the Lung-ChiHo, and the upper reaches of the Yellow River. And long before these gargantuan enterprises are completed, 711 small thermal and hydroelectric plants, recommended and plotted by our Foreign Economic Administration, will be feeding power into China’s arteries.

Most grandiose of the projected developments is that on the Yangtze River, 600 miles from Shanghai. This scheme, unique in engineering history, will some day irrigate 10 million acres, check floods that have ravaged China for centuries, and enable oceangoing ships to sail inland to Chungking. Costing a billion dollars, it will produce more than 81 billion kilowatt-hours of power a year. (The maximum capacity of the Yangtze generators will be 10,560,000 kilowatts. Kilowatt capacity should not be confused with the much greater figure on kilowatthours per year.) The Yangtze Dam will make possible electrified railroads, metallurgical industries, and vast quantities of nitrogen for China’s soil.

John Savage, hard-headed American designer of Grand Coulee, Hoover, Bonneville, and most of the other dams named in this article, considers the Yangtze project the climax of his engineering career. Savage and his backers contend that nitrogen fertilizer can be furnished by the Yangtze development in such abundance that not only will China’s soil be enriched, but 100 million sterile acres in the United States can be revivified at a delivered price half that of present nitrogen imports. Nitrogen, they declare, can pay the entire cost of the Yangtze project within fifteen years of its completion — and leave 50 per cent of its power potential still available for China’s own industrial development.

A preliminary to the Nelson proposal for Chinese TVA’s has been put forward by Alex Taub, wartime Chief Engineer of the Foreign Economic Administration. Taub has detailed a ten-year industrialization program for China similar to one which he has already set up for Brazil. At his request, American concerns have supplied detailed specifications of what it would cost to put economically feasible units of their industries into China. The blueprint calls for 625 factories and 260 thermal power-producing plants, which will be erected on the sites selected for later hydroelectric developments. When the dams are ready, the thermal units will be used as auxiliaries or removed to other locations. The program begins with the production of coal — China’s reserves are the fourth biggest in the world — and of steel. Next step will be power alcohol refineries to offset China’s lack of oil. Like most of the other industrialization programs outlined here, one of the basic purposes of the Taub plan is to export American know-how, so that after an initial period of technical tutelage the Chinese can go ahead on their own.

Millions of Chinese must be trained in industry and millions of dollars must be invested in plants before power can release its full benefits to them. Countrymen must learn the art of coöperative farming; burned-off forests must be replanted; erosion-resistant crops must creep across the Chinese fields. But if the transition is carefully made, there can be progress and prosperity in China.

Food for India

The case of India, homo of pestilence, of famine, of 400 million despairing and fanatical souls, has been called hopeless. The Director of Agricultural Production for India, however, estimated in 1945 that intensified irrigation could raise food production from 50 to 100 per cent, and that increased use of fertilizers would result in a further rise of 20 to 30 per cent. That the inefficiency of Indian workers results primarily from malnutrition is indicated by the experience of the Firestone Rubber Company, which by feeding workmen in India according to American standards was able to turn out as much per man per machine as did the Firestone organization in Akron, Ohio.

For India, as for China, the first step toward higher living standards and a more contented people is industrialization. The first requisite for industrialization is power. Besides controlling floods, conserving soil, and irrigating more than 5 million additional acres, dams envisaged under India’s Bombay Plan would multiply her electric power by four, raising her to the first rank of industrial nations.

Listed, these developments are only strangely beautiful names; Kosi, Godavari, Tunga Bhadra, Jog, Dhirangarh, Chambal, Demodar, Keshau, Bhakra, Larji. In operation, they represent a potential of 26 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity.

Most of the foregoing projects are already scheduled; some are under way as this is written. The remainder wait on equipment and additional technical aid from the United States.

Farmland for the Near East

In the Near East, lifelines of empire tangle in a bewildering web that trembles whenever a great power feints at Iran; whenever Turkey gets a case of nerves; whenever muttering is heard from sullen, intelligent Syria, or court intrigues turn bloody in oil-rich, anachronistic Saudi Arabia.

Walter Lowdermilk, Assistant Chief of the United States Soil Conservation Service, has proposed to strengthen the web by a Jordan Valley Authority which, for a quarter of a billion dollars, would irrigate 155,000 acres in Palestine and produce a billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, besides conserving water and reclaiming land. The Authority would make room for a million settlers and eliminate the economic causes of Palestinian strife.

An interesting companion piece to the JVA exists in Afghanistan, where an American company is already at work on a $16,000,000 industrialization program that includes construction of roads and multi-purpose dams. In Iraq, former President Hoover has called for a $150,000,000 irrigation scheme that would open 3 million acres of the most fertile soil in the world for millions of settlers. In Egypt, the Qattara depression can be filled with water from the Nile to develop 300,000 kilowatts of electrical energy and to irrigate fertile lands in the area. A program for development of the Euphrates River proposes a multi-national Authority that would provide power, navigation, irrigation, and flood control for Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Turkey. In barren Saudi Arabia, explorations of ancient dams in the north reveal possibilities for catching and storing water for human use. Even the Sahara Desert has been adjudged by competent engineers to be a practical subject for irrigation. The least of these projects would bring nearer the day when the Near East would no longer be a bone to fight over, but would become a self-respecting and self-supporting segment of the world community.

Control of rivers

As far back as recorded history goes, prosperity has accompanied the control of rivers, and has vanished when that control has been lost. Irrigation enabled Babylon and Egypt to become each in its turn the mistress of the world. When the Mongols destroyed the irrigation system of what is now Iraq, prosperity and population alike dwindled away. In Greece today can be traced the remnants of great irrigation ditches, running scores of miles side by side. Engineers have declared that Greek imperialism was caused by the simple fact that the Greeks did not have the technical skill to keep the ditches from filling with silt, and had to go abroad for slaves to dig a fresh ditch whenever one filled up. Spain supported nearly twice her present population until her irrigation system was destroyed in the Moorish wars. Today Spanish Valencia, the one spot where the old ditches remain in repair, is a garden spot amid the barrenness of the rest of the country.

Outstanding among present-day engineering enterprises is the TVA, which raised per capita income in the Tennessee Valley 74 per cent against 56 per cent in the rest of the United States. Ireland’s River Shannon development proved that a common productive interest can override bitter religious and patriotic antagonisms. The Niger Valley Authority in French Africa enables natives to produce ten times what they used to get from the same ground. In the Zuider Zee, half a million acres of ocean bed were turned into fertile Dutch farmland. In southwestern France, 2.5 million acres of swampland have been drained to provide homes for hundreds of thousands of people. In Palestine, cities have risen and orange groves are blooming in what was a desert a decade ago.

Global engineering

The value of global engineering is not news to the world’s governments. On September 16, 1946. John G. Winant, United States delegate to the United Nations Economic and Social Council, asked that a scientific conference be called to study conservation and utilization of world resources. Included in the study would be “the possibilities of a single-agency administration of resource developments, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the administration and financial problems of multiple-agency and single-agency development of combined resources.” China presented a similar resolution. The International Technical Congress at its recent Paris meeting suggested a world campaign against undernourishment, bad housing, slum areas, disease, industrial accidents, and poor physical and moral hygiene. It proposed immediate formation of a World Engineering Federation as a pool of engineering knowledge, as well as International Technical Schools for advanced students.

Dams, generators, and irrigation ditches take time a-building. Whether separately or as a branch of the same undertaking, new food techniques should be utilized immediately in a preliminary large-scale attack on world undernourishment. The amazing effectiveness of food yeast in producing protein during World War II, for instance, has opened exciting new possibilities for bringing quick health and vigor to areas short of meat. It has been demonstrated, too, that animal matter strained from sea water can be developed into a palatable and virtually inexhaustible food.

The physical, economic, and social needs of each area suggested for multi-purpose dam development would require separate study. Missions for this purpose should include experts in mining and metallurgy, economics, labor, agriculture, and transportation. They would suggest not only over-all plans but special developments fitting the needs of each region. For China, where transportation is a major problem, a simple all-purpose engine is a major aspect of the Taub plan. In arid parts of Africa, freezing and air-conditioning equipment is a prime need. In the Near East, one of the most useful developments would be a portable repair shop to keep in condition the tools of fishermen, farmers, and small manufacturers.

For maximum effectiveness, multi-purpose engineering developments should treat rivers as entities wherever possible, regardless of national boundary lines. The weakness of the Niger River Authority, for example, is that while it makes the river available for the French upstream, benefits are cut off from the British below. An effective Euphrates Authority would require half a dozen mutually suspicious nations in the Near East to undergo the beneficial discipline of sitting at one table, apportioning water and power according to the greatest good of all. American engineers might well guide these discussions; they have learned the fine art of compromise through years of adjudicating quarrels over water rights among our own western states.

A World Engineering Authority

It seems clear that the proposed Authority should be modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority in several important respects. Developments should be decentralized, should lean heavily on local cooperation, and should have as a principal object the training of local engineers, perhaps through techniques similar to the Army’s work-simplification program or the “each one teach one” scheme of Mexico. Loans should be contingent not only on the desirability of the projects but on their nonpolitical execution, under directors nominated by the creditor agency. And politics should be divorced likewise from amortization schedules. To this end, it may seem advisable to make credits available directly to local sub-Authorities rather than to governments, and to tie repayments to consumption of power and water.

As a guide to formation of the Authority, particularly if it moved from engineering into a broader field of economic development, proposals by Eugene Staley deserve particularly careful study. A Development Authority, he says, should be in a position (1) to launch a world survey of resources and needs; (2) to raise capital by selling securities to governments, savings institutions, and the general public; (3) to advance capital for use on approved projects under stipulated conditions; (4) to serve as intermediary in arranging for capital from other sources, for technical assistance, and for purchases of equipment; (5) to work out plans for guaranteeing a minimum rate of return on approved developmental projects undertaken by private capital; (6) to propose standard forms of contracts and concessions, and get the assistance of the International Labor Office in preparing labor codes; and (7) to act as mediator when disputes arise in connection with international developmental investments. These criteria would be equally pertinent whether the organization was sponsored by one nation or many.

It is probable that government and private interests would be mingled in both the construction and the financing of the projects. Major operations might require engineering combines similar to Henry Kaiser’s Six Companies, builders of Hoover Dam. America’s leading engineers, whether they work for government or for private enterprise, should be available to direct dam construction.

Where will the money come from?

Just as no one private engineering firm could build the Yangtze Dam, so no one private bank could finance it. There should, however, be access to the projects by private capital on non-discriminatory terms.

The projects for India, China, and Palestine will cost $2,843,000,000, expended perhaps over a score of years. Financing media could well vary from area to area.

Donald Nelson estimates that on the Yangtze project, for instance, American capital might amount to 60 or 70 per cent, with an agreement that the Chinese buy a controlling interest over a period of perhaps ten years. Labor would be supplied by the Chinese, and the cost of the hydroelectric units could be liquidated as the project advanced. This would mean that the American capital required for completion of the Yangtze development would be in the neighborhood of $700,000,000, of which a considerable proportion would return to the investors before their total disbursement was completed. It is instructive to compare this figure with the $500,000,000 we have already earmarked for China — a sum which even the most hopeful State Department expert could scarcely hope to see repaid under present conditions.

India’s problem will be one not of obtaining money — she has $5,000,000,000 in sterling balances — but of turning her credits into dollars for purchases of equipment.

Lowdermilk has suggested that, the Jordan Valley Authority take a quasi-public form, part of the cost being covered by bond issues. A considerable part of the investment for most projects might be similarly handled. Assuming that outside capital would be required for 70 per cent of the total cost, or $1,950,000,000, and that over a twenty-year construction period the United States paid the entire amount, our annual disbursement, private and public, would amount to less than $100,000,000.

Electricity is money

What will be the economic effects on Asia of the projects listed here?

Louis H. Bean, of the U.S. Bureau of the Budget, has estimated that a shift of 15 per cent of the labor force in China and India from food production to other work would double the per capita income of both countries, while a 25 per cent shift would treble China’s per capita income. The International Technical Congress recently asserted that if 150 million of the world’s 500 million farmers could be put to work in industry, transportation, trade, or services, the living standards of all mankind would rise at least 50 per cent.

It is of course impossible to predict accurately the distance that the developments listed for India, China, and Palestine would carry them toward this goal. No projection of the power-income relationship for any one country can take into account all the variables of national resources, foreign aid, government po’icy, distribution of income, world conditions, and the proximity of prosperous or backward neighbors. But a yardstick does exist.

Throughout the world, the equivalent of about ten kilowatt-hours of electric power is consumed for every dollar earned. In highly industrialized countries like the United States the proportion of power to income rises; in underindustrialized areas like China or India it drops until the amount, of energy tapped by any individual is little more than his own muscular efforts and those of his draft animals.

Broadly speaking, then, the 115 billion additional kilowatt-hours of electricity contemplated for China may be expected to raise the energy consumption of Ling See from 170 to 500 kilowatt-hours, his income from $50 to about. $165, and the total income of his country to more than $70,000,000,000. Applying the same yardstick to India, the energy consumption of Girja Das would rise from 170 to 240 kilowatt-hours, his income from $57 to $82, and the income of his country from $31,500,000,000 to $45,000,000,000. If all the water power in India’s rivers could be exploited, these Indian estimates would more than double.

A generation might be required in China, and half that time in India, before the full effect of these projects was felt. In Palestine, granted a continuation of foreign financial support and a cessation of internal strife, results would be almost immediate. The billion kilowatt-hours of electricity which would be added to her power supply by the JVA should raise annual income per capita within a decade from $120 to more than $450.

Any such theoretical calculation, of course, is subject to heavy discount. What is certain is the impact of these undertakings on the mental climate and physical well-being of two thirds of the world’s people. Dollar estimates can indicate but dimly the effect on a farmer and his wife of refrigerators and electric ranges; of running water instead of pails dipped into a well; of motors to grind feed for their stock, cut their wood, and turn their lathes; of freezing-lockers in their stores; of hay-driers in their barns. And dollar estimates are helpless in the face of the energies that will be released in the peoples of India, China, and the Near East when the burden of centuries of semi-starvation has been stricken from their backs.

Customers for America

What will be the probable effect of an industrialized Orient, on our own economy? Much of the answer will depend on the extent to which the industrialization is accompanied by social and economic measures designed to increase not only the production but the health, buying power, and political and moral literacy of the coolie, the untouchable, and the fellah. Granted such safeguards, the fear is chimeric that an East capable of mass production would become automatically a dangerous rival for world markets and might even inundate our own.

For lack of industry, India and China today can contribute only 5 per cent to the world’s trade, though they contain 39 per cent of the world’s population. With a healthy industrial life they of course will sell abroad; but if they follow precedent they will buy abroad in a similar degree. Between 1850 and 1929, when the United States was undergoing its great industrialization, our exports were multiplied by thirty-six, but our imports were multiplied by twenty-five. Industrialization of Germany between 1880 and 1914 multiplied her exports by three and a half, but her imports by four. That of Japan (1889-1929) multiplied exports ten times, imports eleven.

In the first phase of the developments, that of dam construction, we shall be called on not only for credits in varying degrees, but for technical assistance and heavy equipment. Purchases of equipment accounted for slightly over a third of the total cost of Hoover Dam and Grand Coulee. The proportion will probably hold good in projects abroad.

Normally, the greater part of the equipment needed for these TVA’s would be bought in this country. Direct purchases here should tread close on three quarters of a billion dollars, in addition to concomitant income to Americans for labor, transportation, and other services.

Savage’s backers declare that the Yangtze project alone would provide enough business to keep the electrical equipment factories of Schenectady humming at their present capacity for the next twentyfour years.

The second phase will begin when the dams are completed and the East calls for industries to use her newly available power. America for at least a generation will be expected to provide the machines that make consumer products for the Orient. The result should be a continuing flow of orders for American capital goods, affording a useful stabilizer for our society’s now risky boom-bust cycle.

The third phase, overlapping the second, will come when prosperity enables Orientals to buy abroad. In speculating on what will happen then, it is pertinent to recall that today the 12 million citizens of industrialized Canada import more goods than the entire 800 million of agricultural China and India. The United Kingdom, with a tenth of China’s population, buys seventeen times as much abroad. Argentina, with a thirty-third of China’s population, buys four times as much.

In 1920, when world income outside our own country was roughly $192,000,000,000, other nations bought $5,160,000,000 worth of goods from us. In 1932, when income beyond our borders had plummeted to $103,000,000,000, our exports dropped 70 per cent, to $1,572,000,000. It is tempting to point out that if the ratio holds good in reverse, an increase of $60,000,000,000 in the income of the Orient would raise her purchases in this country by at least $3,000,000,000 annually — more than the investment required for all the dam projects from all sources over the entire construction period!

And that figure is only a start, for a prosperous Orient means a prosperous, buying world.

Answering the objections

I should like to examine briefly the objections most frequently raised against global engineering.

1. “ The financial risk is too great in view of the unsettled state of the areas involved.” The very fact that no undertaking will be launched where a reliable prospect of internal harmony is lacking is the strongest of inducements to dissident factions to come together. Every credit should wait upon satisfactory assurances of stability; but we should not withhold credits once such assurances are obtained. To do so would be like saying we should let the patient die because an operation might be risky.

2. “Even if the recipient countries retained their stability, they would default on their debts. Why be Uncle Sucker again?” That the projects would produce sufficient revenue to permit liquidation of costs within the periods specified is the consensus of the engineers who have studied and approved them — the same engineers who are responsible for the largest dams in the United States. Certainly no project should be undertaken where the banking agent had any doubt as to the feasibility of the scheduled amortization. There is abundant evidence, however, that even without power revenues sound irrigation projects are a good investment. Completed irrigation works in India are paying 7 to 8 per cent on capital invested. Lands irrigated by the Bureau of Reclamation in this country are producing revenue every year equal to half of their total cost. In the developments proposed for Asia, power production will add vastly to irrigation revenue at comparatively little extra cost.

Between World Wars I and II many governments failed to pay debts owed to the United States; they had to default, since we would not let them buy dollars with goods. If we follow the same course again, defaults will be repeated. The choice on that is ours. But if projects pay for themselves, there is no reason to assume ! hat a stable government will welsh on its foreign obligations.

3. “ If we do get our money back, ive shall be economic imperialists.” It is of course vital that the program be safeguarded against abuses at every stage. The first step in this direction might be an international compact, outlining conditions of investment in foreign countries. A Chinese resolution for such a compact has already been placed before the United Nations.

It would be a disservice to recipients, however, to treat them as charity cases. Save under the most exceptional circumstances they should be expected to give value for value received, if only for the sake of their own morale. Our help is abortive unless through it they learn to help themselves. Dollar diplomacy and economic imperialism are neither good nor evil save in the purposes which they subserve. We shall be using our economic power in the interests of humanity.

And if we be accused of exporting capitalism as well as capital, that is a charge to which it is to be hoped we can plead guilty. Collectivism is being vigorously preached as an answer to the despair of the East. We need feel no shame at giving millions an opportunity to discover for themselves the incomparably greater benefits that can stem from properly directed individual initiative.

4. “An impossible amount of coöperation will be required among recipient nations.” International rivalries and enmities will delay the inception of some projects. The fact that dams cannot be started everywhere tomorrow, however, does not mean that we should fail to start them where we can, or that we should not use the prospect of them as an inducement to settlement of civil and international disputes. Indeed, since our facilities are not limitless, it may be as well that an order of precedence is ready-made for us.

The willingness of Britain to join hands in such a program has been amply evidenced. A series of TVA’s for Near Eastern areas are already a part of the official policy of the British government. Without American help, however, the British will be a long time in moving from blueprint to reality.

5. “Russia will veto the whole idea.” It is true that disaffected areas on Russia’s border are likely breeding grounds for Communist revolution. But they are also likely breeding grounds for world war, which can scarcely be among Russia’s immediate desires. Provided the program is so safeguarded as to threaten no nation’s independence, it should be pushed forward even if Russia views it with a jaundiced eye.

6. “We shall be simply fattening chickens for the Russian bear” Communist infiltration is successful in any country in direct ratio to that country’s ignorance, poverty, and social maladjustment. To raise the living standards of the East is the surest possible insurance against its turning Communist. And if wealth in neighboring countries is a temptation to Soviet conquest, it is equally true that their increased stability and strength, plus the increased Western stake in their survival, should be a healthy deterrent.

Though Russia may find it convenient to use the misery of other people for Communist ends, her future, quite as much as ours, depends on conditions which permit orderly and unfrightened development throughout the world.

7.“ We shall be enabling more Japans to arm themselves and overrun the earth” America has, in the last analysis, two possible approaches to protecting herself in the world of the future. She can try to keep the rest of the world weak; or she can try to make the rest of the world strong. Tempting as the idea of a strong United States in a weak world may appear at a glance, such a paradox is impossible. The result, sooner or later, would be a United States standing alone against a coalition of violently (and in some measure justifiably) inimical dictatorships.

The alternative of strengthening the rest of the world has the same dangers as has the release of any untried strength, whether it comes from a newly powerful nation or from steam, or electricity, or the atom. The danger lies not in the strength but in the uses to which it is put. Through every means in our power we must seek to ensure that the strength of the East is used for the benefit of mankind. Meanwhile, to those who say that we cannot afford a powerful East, one can only reply that we certainly can no longer afford an impotent one.

The fate of civilization today depends on whether peace is to be political alone, or economic and social as well. An economic peace has many parts, and the United States cannot be responsible for them all. But there are certain things that many thoughtful Americans now recognize that we must do. We must maintain and increase our foreign markets if we are to keep our own people employed. To do so, we must permit foreign nations to sell in our own markets to a greater extent than has been our habit in this century. It is questionable, however, whether even the most enlightened trade policies can stabilize the present, gyrating international economy unless they are accompanied by a vigorous drive to raise production and income beyond their present subhuman levels in two thirds of the world.

When General Marshall left China to become Secretary of State, he commented that he had been unable to achieve unity between the warring Chinese factions because “each sought only to take counsel of their own fears.” If our generation pauses too long to take counsel of our fears, we are lost — we and civilization with us. But if we seek soberly and prayerfully to help ourselves by helping these sick and starving ones to help themselves, then we may yet be saved. If the good will really exists in our hearts, America has indeed af hand a lever that can lift the world.