Post-War Plans
Meanwhile America is looking ahead, and rightly. A Washing- ton statement, for which no specific authority was quoted, indi- cated on Wednesday some of the principles on which America's post-war policy will be based. Immense sums will be due to her for material supplied under the Lease-Lend Act, and there is frankly no expectation that they will or can be paid. America is content to leave it so, provided Britain is ready to co-operate on what the American administration conceives to be the right lines after the war. Fortunately they are lines that most reason- able people here will consider right too. America desires the use of all British bases, which ought not to be difficult to arrange, and she lays down thoroughly sound canons—already broadly indicated in the Atlantic Charter—for the removal of barriers to trade and the equitable distribution of raw materials. By another of those undesigned coincidences referred to in a leading article on a later page Mr. Attlee, speaking the same day at the. Inter-
national Labour Conference in New York, was emphasising the need for rational planning, as opposed to regimentation, in the new world and the need for close and continuous co-operation between Great Britain and the United States in the process. He mentioned specifically among the problems to be considered the improvement of standards of living and nutrition. An in- struction by the Governments represented at the New York con- ference to the I.L.O. to begin a study of some of these questions in conjunction with the Financial and Economic section of the League of Nations would be appropriate. Since the one body is at present domicled at Montreal and the other in New Jersey no geographical difficulties would arise.
