A BRITISH foreign correspondent, a little weary after whizzing around the world in pursuit of crises for 25 years, recently confessed to an uneasy feeling that "the world we see is always at its worst," for "unless a place is in some sort of mess or difficulty, we would hardly be there.

"The day may come," he added, "when a newspaper is invented to carry news only of what is going well, what is succeeding, sending its chaps around the world to report on splendid, constructive, merry, positive happenings: the Euphoria Gazette. It will be a very thin, small paper, and its correspondent will work alone."

We hardly qualify, heaven knows, as a Euphoria Gazette, safe and suitable for Pollyanna's night table. We have too much of the world's sadness and spite to report. But our 102 correspondents around the world are in fact on the lookout for the merry and the positive as well as the anguish and the agonizing. A fair proportion of the half a million dollars a year we spend on cables, and the $300,000 that is our reportorial telephone and telegraph bill, is spent on news that is not just crisis. Not because we are trying to strike a false balance, but because we hope to strike a true one.

In this week's issue, for example, there are a number of stories that catch the range of human behavior we seek. A sampler:

-"Right about there we're going to put a city of 100,000 people," he said, pointing. The "he" is William Pereira, California architect and planner, the subject of a cover story on the men who try to find new ways of making urban living an open space once more.

-Call it he-manliness, aggressiveness, brag, or a sense of dignity --the Latin Americans call it macho--but the masculine quality that gives the lands south of the border their individual stamp, for good or evil, is examined in THE HEMISPHERE section.

-Down on the Riviera, beneath a floppy straw hat, sits a contentious and indomitable press lord, Britain's Lord Beaverbrook, keeping an alert eye on his London Express, working on his 13th and 14th books and still full of rage and passion at 84. He is interviewed in PRESS.

-Far from dead, despite De Gaulle, the Common Market is doing more business inside its own borders and with Britain and the U.S. than ever before, and is the subject of a lengthy look in WORLD BUSINESS based on a report by Common Market Correspondent Jason McManus.

-The White House has never been much of a home to the transients who occupy it, even though Andy Jackson added spittoons and Teddy Roosevelt put moose heads on the dining-room walls. But Jackie Kennedy has done a masterly job of making the White House a source of national pride, and her handiwork is shown in six pages of color in ART.

We consider this kind of thing news too.

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