The Ypsilanti Daily Press

Observations
What Will U. S.
Owe World When
War is at End?

WASHINGTON—With this
war's end a bigger row is due to
start in the United States, over
what we Yankees owe to the rest
of the world, than the pending
rumpus amounts to internationally.

Our own prospective internal
conflict won't
involve the employment of
chemical explosives but the
language will
be explosive,
aplenty
Politically it
will be equally
Charles P.
Stewart

The lines already are being drawn, rapidly,
between the rival masses of coming belligerents. You can sense it
in newspaper editorials, in reports
of speeches at forums, in radio
broadcasts in verbal congressional
exchanges and in quite a few federally executive activities

One element wants Uncle Sam to
make himself as helpful as possible, at his own expense, toward
getting all of earth's peoples onto
a basis of mutual economic prosperity, that'll prevent any of
'em from wishing to get into another conflict. Not only, these reasoners contend, is that the charitable Christian way of looking at
the situation, but, in the long run,
it'll be a policy in our American
interest.

The opposition group's version is
that today's conflict will terminate with the entire globe flat broke—
excepting only we western hemisphere folk.
What's left, WE'LL have.

Concessions
Naturally, according to this
school of arguers, the rest will
clamor for us to split with 'em—
by cancelling debts (which'll be
uncollectable, anyway), by future
lease-lending (on into infinite future), by admitting their emigrants "ad lib." by knocking down
our tariff regulations and by whatever additional concessions as we
think up or as they may suggest
to us.

Not to mention that opponents
of such a plan think it would be
overly generous on our part, they
refer to it as outright foolishness.
Their thesis is that the war'll
wind up with about 80 per cent of
civilization busted, but with our 20 per cent somewhat better off than
the rest.

"Why not, then," they ask,
"STAY better off for two or three
succeeding centuries? By being
generous now we may, perhaps,
prove to have kind of stabilized
things by 2142 or thereabouts"—
but that's figuring impractically
ahead, they calculate.

It's a form of reckoning that the
opposition bunch denounces as pro-
war subsequently.

That is to say, as they view the
matter, unless we voluntarily divide up with our fellow-victors,
they presently will be driven to
fight with us for their share of
the war-won gravy.

In other words, Britain, for instance, will be bankrupted. Germany also.
They both will be in the same
soup.

Won't there be a disposition, between'em, to combine to stick
US up?

I make no such prediction
Nevertheless, it's a ground upon
which certain little forecasts have
been based.

It's happened before that there
have been Anglo-German economic
combinations versus the United
States.

In the Offing
There is, at any rate, developing
commercial rift between the United
States and our wartime-associated powers not an immediate
one, but anticipatory.

At the moment there's no competition, naturally.
It's that post-war situation that
will manifest itself.

Then it'll become conspicuous,
particularly as between the United
States and Great Britain.

There's no argument that our
administration is pro-British and
is going to stay so, but will it lap
over into the post-war period? And
might it get sore at us with post-