The Future of Half the World

With elections due in the fall, both major parties in Britain were beginning to nip at one another's heels. There was not all that much to argue about. Labor M.P. James Callaghan, economics spokesman in the shadow cabinet, rose in the Commons to express shock at the hardly startling discovery that several large corporations were funneling money into Conservative Party coffers. For their part, the Tories were trying to force Labor to discuss details of its plans for nationalization, which Harold Wilson's men have been deliberately vague about; in the end, Deputy Leader George Brown repeated an earlier pledge to bring steel, truck transport and much urban land under government ownership or control.

On defense policy, Wilson scathingly attacked the government's "pathetic idea" that the decision "to hire Polaris missiles from the U.S." has any serious influence on the course of events. But there was accord between Conservatives and Labor on at least one issue. At one with Labor on China policy, Prime Minister Douglas-Home declared: "Far better that China should be in the United Nations, that there should be increased contact between the West and China, and that China should be gradually weaned away, as we have weaned the Russians away, from this policy of including force in Communist doctrine."

It might be done through increased trade, added Sir Alec. "I have persisted in my view, put rather crudely perhaps, that a fat Communist is to be preferred to a thin Communist."

The view with variations had its adherents across the Atlantic. In a commencement address at St. John's University in Jamaica, L.I., former U.S. Ambassador to Italy Clare Boothe Luce warned that Red China, now "isolated militarily and economically by both U.S.S.R. and U.S. policy," might turn desperately aggressive. In Southeast Asia, said she, "we must hold firm even if it becomes necessary to wield a nuclear stick over the head of Mao Tse-tung." But, added Speaker Luce, there are other ways to stop Chinese expansionism. "For example, what argument can be made for our present policy of trading with the Russians or selling them wheat that cannot also be made for trading with Red China, and feeding her far hungrier and far more desperate people? Long before the young men in this audience are old, China will account for half the population of the whole world. We must soon find ways of living at peace with half the human race, or your generation will know nothing but endless war in the Orient."

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