Youth Plans For Peace

Victory or defeat in both the war and the peace largely depends upon one group in this country--the younger generation. Their role in the actual hostilities is pretty obvious. The part they will play in reconstruction is not obvious at present however and never will be unless they make it so themselves. It is the budding Harvard Council on Post-War. Problems which has seriously undertaken to meet the challenge. Perhaps their original idea was simply that since youths are fighting and dying, they should have some influence on the final results of their efforts. Or, more probably, they understood the particular responsibility which college students have in peace-planning--immersed as they are in the tradition of history and the philosophy of institutions, situated as they are in an especially vital nerve-center of democracy. The latter motive seems borne out by the first public statement of this ambitious group.

After the preamble, which assumes that "True victory. . . will come only if we have the courage to make this crusade an endeavor of intellect as well as physical force," come statements of the particular problems facing each committee. "International Political Organization," International Economic Problems," Ideologies" and "Domestic Economy": the committees for all of these broad subdivisions are planning endlessly detailed research and discussion to find something better than "peace in our time."

The pitfalls for such a venture are numerous. First, the planners will be tempted to devise an over-all blueprint, after a certain amount of study, and turn into a pressure group for their own beliefs: Harvard has had some particularly illuminating experience with pressure groups. They fall to pieces after a flashy start; they dissolve when their small aims are accomplished or when they despair of their big aims; or the members part at a political fork in the road. Definitely, the Post-War Council must avoid over-organization; it must preserve its balance and entertain all viewpoints. The second danger is that the flame of the idea will be confined to Harvard; that the committees will stop short of every state and endowed college from Boston to Los Angeles. If they never forget that their movement is in pitiful infancy until they achieve such a scale, there is some hope for idealism. The proposed national monthly magazine is the obvious vehicle for expansion. Let it not be all of a Crimson hue.

The third important bogey is partly dispelled by the pamphlet described above; it is the desperate error of treading on clouds; of planning with a dreamer's misty brain for the sheer delight of planning. In peeling off the layers of what-has-been-done-before they must not forget that history is the best teacher; they must go deep into basic reasons for failure of world organization and economic systems; they must examine the generalized Eight Points and such detailed plans as are put forward in high places; they must examine such statements, too, as the one thrown out at the recent philosophers' conference at the University of Wisconsin--"We need more guts than philosophy." They must work hard and long and unremittingly to put this generation's ideas on record. If they and we value America as much as the men now fighting the war, they will not fail.