OPINION: All Men Are Human

On V-E day, before 2,000 of his students, the University of Chicago's 46-year-old President Robert Maynard Hutchins, onetime boy wonder of U.S. education, launched into the subject of war criminals (see INTERNATIONAL). What he said was provocative: he asked for mercy for the Germans. It was the first round in an argument of which the world would hear more.

Said President Hutchins:

"I venture to predict that the present excitement about war criminals will seem ridiculous a few years hence. At this juncture we can afford to remember what

Edmund Burke said of us : 'I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.' "We cannot support the thesis that be cause German leaders acted illegally, therefore they should be treated illegally. Two wrongs do not make a right. It is easy to understand why Mussolini was lynched; it is more difficult to see why Americans should gloat over it. ...

"If we do not intend to rule the Germans as slaves by military force till the end of time, we must treat them with justice and, if possible, with mercy. Other wise we lay here and now the foundations of the next war. . . .

"The most distressing aspect of present discussions of the future of Germany and Japan is the glee with which the most in human proposals are brought forward and the evident pleasure with which they are received by our fellow citizens. . . . The peace of the world depends upon the restoration of the German and the Japanese people. The wildest atrocity stories can not alter the simple truths that all men are human, that no men are beasts. . . . Let us remember that vengeance is the Lord's. . . ."

Chicago's Hutchins thus revived the theory, widely held before 1939, that a harsh peace breeds another war. If he thought no men were beasts, there were plenty of others who thought otherwise. Their feelings were aptly expressed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Cartoonist Dan Fitzpatrick. whose charcoal lines often speak louder than words (see cut).