"Thirty Years Later"

In the U.S. last week for talks with U.S. postwar planners was England's pink-cheeked, birdlike Sir William Beveridge, with his bride. The author of Britain's famed proposal for "cradle to grave" security through compulsory insurance kept his arrival secret for two days, finally emerged at a press conference in the sumptuous offices of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Did Sir William care to discuss the proposal for U.S. postwar relief and employment offered by the National Resources Planning Board (TIME, March 22)--a document sometimes referred to as the American Beveridge Plan? He did:

"A very remarkable and able document . . . but only in showing the facts of insecurity in the United States as an argument for doing something. I would say that the NRPB report is not so detailed, not so practical as mine. It is concerned with principles rather than with details."

Sir William was plainly trying to spare the rod. He continued: "In England it would correspond to the 1906-09 report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law and Relief of Distress. But, of course, it is only natural that you in America would be 30 years late in discovering the spread of unemployment and poverty because your standard of living is so much better than ours. The NRPB report simply shows that unemployment and poverty exist."

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