WORLD LEADERSHIP

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 122, 25 May 1945, Page 5

WORLD LEADERSHIP

AMERICAN RESPONSIBILITY ! Rec. 11 a.m. RUGBY, May 24. "On the United States, for the first time, falls the responsibility for world leadership," said the United States Secretary of Commerce, Mr, Henry Wallace, when speaking at a world trade luncheon during New York Foreign Trade Week. "It is much the same kind of leadership as that which England gradually assumed after the Napoleonic Wars a century ago. We are the only great nation with its industries unbombed and with its highways and railways in good working condition. Our economy is ready not only to give our own people a higher standard of living than they ever had, but also, through a programme of sensible investment in those nations which want to help themselves, to bring about a restoration of world productivity." . it . .. After giving a warning that there might be a period of a year or two when there would be a grave danger of inflation in the United States, Mr. Wallace said that after that danger was passed the Government must get out of export licensing with all possible speed. AMERICAN ERROR. The great mistake of the United States in the decade of the twenties, he said, was that she gave foreign nations reason to believe that she would never allow them to send their goods into the United States to balance exports, with no margin to pay even interest on the money which Americans had loaned abroad. "Now the European war is over, we want to help foreign traders to reestablish connections in the liberated areas just as soon as conditions over there will permit the renewal of direct international trading between private firms," he said. —8.0. W.