AGENDA FOR A POST WAR WORLD

One of the season's dullest titles for a really important and stimulating book, so don't let it down you. Sell it in conjunction with the Carr book (P. 251), Conditions of Peace, to be published July 7th. For here is an American contribution, along not dissimilar lines, and more directly applicable to the immediate problems all thoughtful people recognize. He, too, advocates an interim period of control, not only internationally, but internally, to mitigate the disastrous results of a shift back to peace operation. Peace must be politically hard, economically generous. Experts on financial and economic internal needs of the warring countries must be prepared to take hold; efficient governments must be sustained or restored. The real costs of the war, to everyman, must be faced -- painful sacrifice and difficult adjustment. Labor and capital must be kept mobile, prices and costs controlled, through a period of economic transition. There must be a flexible and mutual balancing of international payments, an extension of wartime collaboration to permanent collaboration, universal economic collaboration, and limitation of national sovereignty. He points out the dangers of regional limitations, illustrating from the mistakes of the last ""peace"". He indicates the lines of social security that must be considered, -- national minimum income, socialization of public utilities , agricultural protection, commodity controls, new nutrition level, elimination of reactionary elements from government and sets of power. He points out the difficulties of demobolization, the need of employment control, of multilateral trade agreements, of sustaining credit, of balanced taxes. He then goes on to international problems, the extension and interpretation of the lesse-lend act, the problem of reparations versus reconstruction, the acceptance of the payment in goods and services; and the other side of the picture in the contribution we must make of loans, technical aid, refugee settlement, new frontiers of investment, freer trade under political control. In final challenge he points out the responsibility of power in the post-war world...I've ventured to summarize this book in this detail because I feel it is of vital importance that the layman read and ponder constructive analyses of post-war planning. Vice President Wallace, in the already famous speech (see page 280) calls this a people's war. It must -- too be a people's post-war world. Condliffe has made a real contribution to better understanding of the problems involved and possible solutions.