The amens were plainly visible in the faces of the men who spoke for 12 countries. These men were strikingly different in makeup and background. But the language of the president was their language. They expressed it differently, but the variants echoed the presidential sentiment. Each of them has his mind concerned with the people’s livelihood. Why these leaders came together in what British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin called a “pool of peace” was to remove the shadow of war that is impeding their people in the pursuit of work and happiness.
However, there can be no stroke-of-the-pen peace. Nothing in life can be gained except through effort, and peace is one thing that is a daily achievement. After an exhausting war, this is generally forgotten in relief and rejoicing, and evil takes advantage of relaxation and sloth. Another danger is that the young, generation after generation, are apt to think of peace as the automatic result of the setting up of machinery.
There is a sense of disillusion in present-day American youth, for instance, over what they think is the failure of the United Nations. It is wrong to think in such terms. The United Nations, like the League of Nations before it, hasn’t failed. What has happened is a demonstration that all the nations are as yet unable to live up to the words they uttered at the San Francisco conference creating the organization.
We ought to be glad that there are so many countries that are prepared to start again, release themselves from the nonaction imposed by others and reaffirm their obligations. The freshly pledged words look bright with promise because they are words that have been sharpened by bitter experience. Christian theologian Thomas à Kempis once said, “All men desire peace, but few are prepared to pay the price of peace.”
Judging from yesterday’s ceremony — not only the signers but also the millions who stood behind the signers yesterday in mute silence and grim determination — this is occasion for hope. It shows that the idea of the United Nations is very much alive in the hearts of men and the calculations of statesmen. It is as if men had profited from a setback and taken firmer hold in their march along the Holy Grail. At least, as Luxembourg Foreign Minister Joseph Bech said, with a sense of reality as well as of moderation, “It may give the world a salutary period of lasting peace.”
The time thus saved, to reiterate, will be of no service unless it is used to build upon this pledge. The unity to resist must go hand in hand with the unity of living together in neighborliness. As Count Carlo Sforza, Italy’s foreign minister, said, the pact must be a “continuous creation,” like Magna Carta.
Works added to faith and pledges make for progress, and one such work on the eve of the pact-signing may be noted. France and Italy, following in the footsteps of Belgium and Holland, have just taken the first step toward a customs union. This is a milestone in the march to the unity that will bind the nations together in common enterprises.
North America has a stake in the growth of this unity and in contributing to it. Through the Marshall Plan, the stage was set for a common pursuit of joint enterprises. The money is in the bank, as it were, and a pooling of the counterpart funds for European projects would be proof of the positive peacemaking that the president described the North Atlantic Security Pact.
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