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Cater Hits European 'War Is Here' Attitude, Calls for Student Exchange to Keep Peace

In his first appearance before the student body of the College since his return from Prague, Douglass Cater '46 outlined the results of the Prague conference and pleaded for international cooperation on the student level at an open forum in the Lowell House Junior Common Room last night.

Coincidentally, Cater announced that the Student Council Comittee on International Student Affairs, which he heads, has made tentative plans to bring Carl Grube, Austrian Foreign Minister presently in this country, before a College audience some time this fall. Grube's talk would be the first in a possible series of forums on international relations which may feature such men as Jan Masaryk and Henry Wallace, Cater said, however, that plans are only in the formative stage at present, and that more details would become available after his committee met in full for the first time, probably early next week.

Citing as an example the New York Times correspondent in Prague, who told him that "the war is already on, we are only waiting for a formal declaration," Cater asserted that among official and unofficial Americans in Europe the kind of talk that Henry Wallace hit at--the war is here attitude--was already common. This point of view, Cater said, was definitely not prevalent in the student representative, and that real hope existed for the maintenance of peace if there could be free exchange of thought between students of the world.

Cater also outlined the need for a National Students Congress--to be the equivalent of the International Congress at the national level--and announced that a preliminary conference of student delegates would be held in Chicago during the Christmas vacation, to be followed, after methods had been worked out, by a national congress in the early weeks of the summer.

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