RESPONSIBILITY BOLDLY TAKEN

Evening Post, Volume CXXXII, Issue 82, 3 October 1941, Page 4

RESPONSIBILITY BOLDLY TAKEN

The super-committee which coordinated all the committee reports of the Moscow conference consisted of only four men—Stalin, Molotov, Beaverbrook, and Harriman. With great speed, these four sifted the committee recommendations and gave the selected ones the official ukase. Had the super-committee in Moscow numbered not four but fourteen, it would have been so fruitful of ideas that the might have been referred back endlessly to the technical committees, never to be finalised. "Every night," states Lord Beaverbrook, "we co-ordinated fthe committee findings—Stalin, Molotov, Harriman, and I, with Litvinov as our only interpreter." Lord Bea verb rook's manifest joy in the rapid decisions of the four-men committee raises the question what he would do if he had power to fix War Cabinets. Would they be similarly reduced to simple numbers, and would they be expected to record decisions instead of philosophic doubts? Harriman is an American who seems to have the Harry Hopkins gift for rapid understanding and nerve to decide. Beaverbrook is a newspaper ma» who all his life has known what he wanted. Stalin and Molotov also are men without fear, for how could they rule Russia if the fear complex gripped them? The upshot is thaJ. in the matter of help to Russia, the super-committee is "getting things done." What is done will not be free from mistakes and misadventure. But a percentage of mistakes in the taking of rapid measures is preferable to a go-sloHv policy paralysed by fear of error. Russia's crisis demands speed,' for reasons both moral and material.