An Arrogant Challenge

Harold Laski, who has read almost everything, must have read Thomas `a Kempis' "I desire rather to know compunction than its definition." Harold Laski, who will define anything, is still a stranger to compunction.

Little Laski came last week to New York to speak on "The Challenge of the Atomic Bomb." It was a time and a topic that pressed humility upon the brows of larger men, searching their hearts to root out the seeds of conflict with their fellows. Harold Laski was troubled by no doubts. Tinnily, his arrogant challenge rang through the Astor Hotel's crowded ballroom.

"There is no middle way. Free enterprise and the market economy mean war; socialism and planned economy mean peace. All attempts to find a compromise are a Satanic illusion."

Here, in capsule, was the implacable Left. Much of Laski's audience belonged to the placable Left--New Dealers who preached a muddled "middle way" for its own sake, without much effort to formulate principles. Yet they cheered Laski, the absolutist, who sufficiently relaxed his absolutism to make a deep bow to a compromiser, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as the "supreme friend of democracy and freedom."

Many were dismayed to hear a top British leader denouncing compromise; but their gloom might be lightened by recalling that Laski does not lead the British Labor Party whose brow he inhabits. Although he has initiated many a successful leftist politician into the austere mysteries of "revolution by consent," as yet no public vote anywhere has ever elected Harold Laski to anything.

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