The Line That Failed

For a few hours this week the thirty-eighth parallel was abolished. The imaginary line that has been worrying everyone from Lake Success to Seoul for almost a year succumbed suddenly to General MacArthur's edict that correspondents would not be allowed to mention it in their dispatches.

The parallel's existence had always been an uncertain one. Whichever army happened to be advancing at the time held that the line was purely an arbitrary division set up to facilitate the Japanese surrender; the retreating forces usually considered it a sacred boundary. The Korean farmers, treated to a fine show of invasion and repulsion, probably did not care much.

Now that there is a wobbly no-man's-land across the middle of Korea, there is a possibility that the parallel or a reasonable facsimile thereof will be formalized again with barbed wire and armed patrols. Though both the U.N. and the Communists are convinced the line should go, they disagree on where it should go, and even one of MacArthur's glorious gestures is not sufficient to solve the problem.