ORGANIZATIONS: Elijah *from Missoula

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Prophet's Lot. Today in the cluttered third-floor offices of a walkup on Washington's dingy Ninth Street, N.W., 54-year-old Clarence Streit edits a magazine, Freedom & Union, which is devoted to the cause. Eight other full-time employees, plus a handful of part-time and volunteer researchers, comprise his staff. Streit is down on the modest payroll for $428 a month—his only regular income. Freedom & Union's circulation: 8,000.

This small audit would floor a less indomitable man. Streit accepts it stoically as an Elijah's lot, and plods on. He lives with his wife at the top of five flights of stairs ("Elevator Not Working") in a crumbling Victorian pile in Mount Pleasant. In a small study, where the homey confusion of the Streits' oldfashioned, high-ceilinged rooms reaches a climax of chaos, he does most of his work. In off-hours he writes verse, and (unpublished) "popular" songs.

But there are few off-hours for a crusader. If the world will not listen, then the world must be seized by the ears and explained to, argued with, exhorted.

Let Russia Whistle. He has revised his original idea somewhat. In order to get things going, he cut his original 15 nations down to a nucleus of the seven original Atlantic pact countries. But the door was wide open to all the other democracies. He and his supporters set up the Atlantic Union Committee as a political action group. He had won over the earnest aid of a few influential men, among them former Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts, who quit the court to devote a large part of his time to the work, now is president of the A.U.C.; former Under Secretary of State Will Clayton, former Secretary of War Robert Patterson, Historian Herbert Agar, Chemist Harold Urey (a Montana college classmate of Streit).

This was a challenging list of names. Of all the panaceas, Atlantic Union was in some ways the most practical proposition. The reason it was: the decision to take it up lay solely with the seven democracies.

In Ely Culbertson's proposal, which included a voluntary limitation of arms, there was a basic weakness; it counted on Russia's being agreeable. If Russia continued to pile up atomic weapons, Culbertson would simply serve notice on her: evacuate your industrial cities, they are going to be bombed. The World Constitution plan of Chicago University's Chancellor Robert Hutchins did not depend upon, but clung to, the hope that a way to get along with Russia might still be found.

The closest thing to Atlantic Union was United World Federalists, inspired by Cord Meyer Jr., sometime marine captain who was desperately wounded at Guam, later resolved to spend the rest of his life fighting for peace. The difference between A.U.C. and U.W.F., exaggerated by their partisans, was mainly procedural. Both pointed in the same direction.