ORGANIZATIONS: Elijah *from Missoula

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Demobbed and back in the U.S., Streit finished his college education at Missoula, went off to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. He spent his vacations wandering around Europe, in Paris met and fell in love with blonde Jeanne Defrance. When they married, he had to quit Oxford: he went to work as a newspaperman.

Correspondent Streit covered Mussolini's March on Rome. He went to North Africa for the New York Times to report the peaceful exhuming of an older, buried civilization—Carthage—and found himself reporting the Riff war. He covered the Balkans and ended up finally covering the League of Nations in Switzerland.

The Poison. From Geneva, where he had settled with his wife and three children, Pierre, Jeanne and Colette, Streit watched the collapse of Wilson's dream of world peace. Now disillusioned, he watched as the League gagged over the march of the Japs into Manchuria in 1931, as the 1932 Disarmament Conference ended in a fiasco, as the London Economic Conference wheezingly expired. He listened as the hot winds of Naziism roared through Germany. The underlying theme of the history which he reported in long, earnest dispatches to the Times was always the same—the disunity and ineffectiveness of the democracies in meeting the crises of history. He was sure that he was attending the burial of another civilization.

He searched for causes & effects. It was about that time, with some Sunday articles in mind and looking for an angle, that he made what he thought was a major discovery. He had begun his search by dividing the contemporary world into two parts—into the democracies where the state existed for man, into the authoritarian governments where man existed for the state. To Reporter Streit an arresting fact emerged: the democracies controlled two-thirds of the world's trade, most of the world's natural resources. The democracies owned the earth and didn't know it. The totalitarian nations depended upon them for their very existence. And yet the democracies—he listed 15—were pushed about and some of them inevitably would be overwhelmed.

Analyzing the failure of the League, Journalist Streit came to one basic conclusion : it had been done in by pride, self-interest and jealousy, in short by unbridled nationalism. He conceded that nationalism could also be a matter of enlightened self-interest, patriotism, independence, other good things. But when sovereignty became a fetish, he thought, it produced more evil than good. Nationalism, he decided, was the poison that had killed peace.

Federal Union. What did hundreds of millions of individual people, he asked, gain from "absolute nationalism"? Nothing, as Streit reasoned. On the contrary, the governments, in the name of nationalism, were merely taking their people towards their own destruction.

The idea of a federal union of those hundreds of millions of people began to hatch. In such a union the separate governments would give up some of their powers. But the individual citizen, argued Streit, would lose nothing; rather he would gain new freedom and new influence as a citizen of one great and powerful democracy.