IS ANYTHING ENOUGH?

The Marshall Plan, for months one of Europe's few promises of hope, had at last become reality by act of the U.S. Congress. John Osborne, chief of TIME'S London bureau, cabled the following account of how Europeans took the news:

Never before have the attitudes and acts of one nation mattered so much to so many people in the world as every impulse, wish and act of the U.S. will hereafter matter to the Western world. Never before have the attitudes and capacities of so many other nations mattered so much to the U.S. What awaits Americans in the Europe which they have undertaken to preserve, restore, and if need be to defend?

Not a great deal of confidence. The House of Representatives' short-lived amendment to include Spain in ERP (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS; showed that clearly. A great many people have suffered agonies of apprehension over the news. It caused instant repercussions within the Labor Party and the trade unions, most of which had been so painfully won to pro-American, anti-Soviet collaboration. Even though the actual deed is now canceled, its effects will be felt for a long time. One aftereffect here will be a revival of the deep-seated assumption that Americans are unpredictable and therefore difficult fellows to live with.

The Question. Americans cannot expect to find gratitude, either, although Europeans are astonished by the bold and on the whole unfettered form which Marshall aid has taken. It contradicts all that they had presupposed of the U.S. Congress, which in these parts is expected to do the right thing in the wrong way, if at all. Wrote the Manchester Guardian: "The U.S. has risen to the occasion. It is now for the nations of Western Europe to do no less." But the deepest wish of our friends in Europe is that they did not have to accept our aid.

The most Americans can expect-- and it is a lot--is a better European understanding of the impulses and motives of which America is capable. We and the Russians between us have made it very clear that our assistance is not disinterested. But millions of Europeans sensed that only the unique and uncalculated generosity of millions of Americans made Mr. Marshall's offer possible last June. That is still remembered, though not with unalloyed joy. The human heart in the coal valleys of Wales or beside the Po is pretty much what it is in Kansas. People do not like to be excelled, even in generosity.

Our billions and our goods are going into a Europe which is worse than bankrupt. It is an ill and disordered Europe, a psychotic wasteland, with certain islands of relative sanity. We should be neither surprised nor disappointed if our dollars do not heal the inner hurts of Europe.

The physical damage of war can perhaps be repaired. It is superfluous to say: this will not be enough. We know it. Europeans know it. The relevant question is whether anything can be enough; whether there is still in Europe the making of a real revival.

It is not apparent now. But the wish and the cry for it are here. If Europe's millions have any defined yearning, it is for a belief, a life, a place worth having and holding. The immediate symptoms of this half-conscious need are two common emotions, which will condition many of the attitudes which we encounter with our aid in Europe. One is pride. The other is guilt.

The Wonder. Europe's pride is the tender and assertive pride of age. The fashion now among such British intellectuals as Novelist Evelyn Waugh and Essayist Cyril Connolly is to say that only the dying old have life, and that the life and vigor of America are the world's true death. At earthier levels, the feeling is usually met in the adjective "bloody" which is indulgently prefixed to anything American--including our aid. We must not let irritation at these manifestations blind us to their meaning, which in its crudest terms is simply that we will get more for our money if we decline to be bothered by them.

Europe's guilt is more complex, more subtly expressed, and more easily abused. Its burden is the burden of Western man's whole failure to make more of his life and his world than he has so far made. It rests with especial weight upon the conscience of Europe, because it is here that Western civilization has come to visible and extreme; catastrophe. Europeans may tell themselves, as they do, that the younger peoples of the American hemisphere share the failure. But it is to European eyes that the ruin of Berlin, the chaste and ordered scars of London present their continuous reminders of what so recently has been and so soon may be again.

The wonder is not that Europeans living amid the testaments to our common failure do so little for themselves, or show so little enthusiasm for this last battle to save what is left. The wonder is that since the end of World War II they have done so much, an that with our aid we can now reasonably expect them to do more.

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