Progress at the Palais

"No heartstrings will be pulled," said a tired British delegate, "but the mere cold facts will tell an eloquent tale." At the Grand Palais in Paris, he and other delegates were working 15 hours a day last week to finish Western Europe's response to the Marshall approach. They had little time for anything but the cold facts. The conference bureau had not sold a theater seat in two weeks. This strict attention to business had produced some results. One delegate reported on the conference's biggest achievement:

"Right now there is an annual deficit of twelve million tons of coke in Western Europe. [But] we have been able to wipe out this deficit by simple cooperation. . . . We have recommended that henceforth no more coke shall be used for heating houses or stoking factory boilers. All available European coke is to go straight into steelmaking. . . . Blast furnaces shall use more scrap. . . . Germany is littered with scrap. . . ."

This was precisely the kind of planning that Marshall had invited. It would go a long way to convince the U.S. Congress that Europe was worth helping because it intended to help itself.

One delegate summed up the prevailing mood at the Grand Palais: "Europe will have to work harder. The United States will have to ... [help] fill the inevitable gap during the next four years. But it's no good sending dollars; they return to America like homing pigeons."

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