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Show t '; - PC 1 WHO'S NEWS THIS WEEK By LEMUEL F. PARTON (Consolidated Features WNU Service.) NEW YORK. There was once a hill-billy girl who walked 10 miles over the mountain to borrow a hammer. She said her pappy was figuring to Little Candles build himself Still Burn in a a house next Darkening World falL "wa3t s an a ct of faith, not to be cynically regarded, in spite of small beginnings and remote re-mote eventualities, and quite comparable com-parable to the brave hopes and contrivances con-trivances of sundry men of good will today. . Paul Van Zeeland, former premier of Belgium, is one of them. He sees a world of decentralized de-centralized power after the war, with small, autonomous states of economic and political groupings, group-ings, associated in regional collaboration col-laboration diverse enough to allow a "localization of function" func-tion" in world economy and compact enough to form a stable political equilibrium. He presented his plan to the New York conference of the International Labor organization, and, simultaneously, simultane-ously, there issued from the conference con-ference a proposal for a bloc of nations, comprising Poland, Czechoslovakia, Czecho-slovakia, Jugoslavia and Greece, for post-war rebuilding and for collective col-lective defense. M. Van Zeeland, holding both earned and honorary degrees from Princeton university, is widely and favorably known in this country both as a political philosopher and banking economist. He was a soldier sol-dier in the World war, and in the ensuing years was an experimenter and innovator in financial theory and practice in a desperate effort to sidetrack a doom which he thought might well end Western civilization. Here in 1937, as unofficial envoy en-voy of Europe, he tried to sell the United States a bigger cut in the bank for international settlements, with the quite plausible idea that a freer flux of money throughout the world would cure bellicose nationalism. national-ism. Nothing came, of this, but M. Van Zeeland keeps on hunching. hunch-ing. The son of a prosperous merchant of Soignes, he was educated at Lou-vain Lou-vain and Princeton, returned to Belgium Bel-gium to practice law and won eminence emi-nence as an economist and banker a director of the Bank of Belgium and professor of law at the University Univer-sity of Louvain. BACK in the days of the militant suffrage campaign, this reporter report-er asked several of the leaders whether they intended to maintain a political Militant Women solidarity of Out for Equality women after Of Responsibility teTh said they would do just that. The emphasis was on the effective pressure pres-sure group, rather than on widely diffused social responsibility among women. Considering that that is the history of pressure groups, of both genders how to get power, rather than its social uses and implications there is news interest in-terest in the simultaneous arrival arriv-al of two distinguished women leaders of foreign countries each of whom has stressed social so-cial responsibility, along with the "liberation" and political education of women. They are Miss Caroline Haslett of Great Britain and Scnora Ana Rosa S. de Martinez Gerrero of Argentina. Argen-tina. Miss Haslett is an engineer and adviser to the British ministry of labor, somewhat comparable in her career and achievements to our Lillian Lil-lian Moller Gilbreth of Montclair, N. J. She will study the participation participa-tion of American women in the defense de-fense effort and will deliver some addresses on the technical and industrial in-dustrial mobilization of British women wom-en in the war. She is president of the Women's Wom-en's Engineering society, director direc-tor of the Electrical Association of Women, founder and editor of the Woman Engineer and the Electrical Handbook for Women. Wom-en. With many variants and on many occasions, she has said: "Women once asked for equality of opportunity. Now we ask for equality of responsibility." The career of Senora De Martinez Gerrero hns been a close parallel to that of Miss Haslett in its repeated repeat-ed stress on social responsibility. She came to Washington to attend the annual meeting of the Inter-American Inter-American Commission of Women of which she is chairman. A spirited evangel of Western hemisphere solidarity sol-idarity against totalitarianism, she tells the meeting that the mission of women is to "rekindle the flame of a living faith in democracy." Senora De Martinez Gerrero is the wife of a wealthy cattleman and the mother of three children. |