THE PEOPLE'S CENTURY
307
Department. But on three crucial propositions all official formu–
lators of war aims are agreed:
l.
"Private enterprise" is to be preserved.
"Mr. Wallace set Hitler's war in its correct historical per–
spective," commented Dorothy Thompson on Wallace's speech.
"Putting the Russian revolution where it belongs, as a step in the
struggle of a great people towards fuller consciousness and higher
organization, he clearly affirmed his belief in private property as
a basic human right." In this reconciliation of the 1917 Revolution
and private property, Wallace performs the same kind of miracle
that our post-war "planners" do. A recent survey by the Twentieth
Century Fund of 102 agencies now engaged in this fascinatiug
occupation showed that: "The desirability of preserving the pri–
vate enterprise system ·as the chief component in the American
post-war economy is widely taken for granted by both public and
private agencies."
Confessing his faith in "a swell world after the war," Milo
Perkins, director of the Board of Economic Warfare and Wallace's
closest collaborator, recently predicted "a greater future than ever
for Lhe capitalistic system." (N.
Y. Herald-Tribune,
May 17)
There is a striking similarity between the shape of this "swell
world" as seen by Milo Perkins and by Henry Luce. The latter
writes, in "The American Century":
The vision of America as the dynamic leader of world trade
has within it the possibilities of such enormous human progress
as to stagger the imaginaton. Let us not be staggered by it. Let
us rise to its possibilities.... We think of Asia as being worth
only a few hundred millions a year to us. Actually, in the decades
to come, Asia will be worth to us exactly zero-or else four,
five, ten billions a year. And the latter are the terms in which
we must think, or else confess a pitiful impotence.
Mr. Perkins confesses to no such pitiable state, as reported by
the
Tribune:
Mr. Perkins advances many arguments in favor of his thesis.
He points out the great new market that would be opened by the
industrialization of Asia, of India, of Africa. He notes that by
increasing the income of the people of Asia alone by one penny a
day there would be created a new 4-billion-a-year market. He
adds that it staggers comprehension to picture the vast markets
that would be established if it were possible to provide the peo–
ples of the world with merely the minimum of food and shelter.
Messrs. Luce and Perkins write as though up to now no one
had suspected the existence of this vast potential market in Asia.
