The Schuman Plan—A Preliminary Prediction

When M. Schuman first presented his celebrated Plan over two years ago, American views, official and public, were divided between an easy cynicism and a careless rapture. Optimism was stirred by the promise of a unity of European peoples, achieving strength, peace and prosperity through their mutual interests in producing coal and steel. Cynicism amused itself with a vision of a new bureaucracy, exercising new controls through the monster international cartel hidden beneath M. Schuman's diplomatic dress. All groups of opinion, materialistic and democratic in outlook, would have agreed that the Plan, however conceived and dedicated, could not long endure unless it touched the popular heart through raising the standard of living. Here, as elsewhere, Americans looked for Europe's salvation in the joy, excitement, strength and sense of human kinship that is supposed to come from successfully executed achievements in engineering.