After the General Assembly’s acceptance, to make the Universal Declaration law there remained only the act of ratification by each participating government. It was at this point that a hitch developed. Perhaps the State Department had dismissed, even at its inception, the work of the Commission on Human Rights as unimportant. Perhaps the State Department was so concerned with the “practical and immediate” problems of the cold war that it simply forgot the Declaration for two years, and forgot, too, that the United States had taken the lead in securing the General Assembly’s adoption of a resolution embodying the Declaration. Perhaps there were petty and selfish political considerations. Perhaps there was bald hypocrisy in the whole thing. I cannot give cause. I can only declare that when, in 1950, after what seemed an unnecessarily long delay, the matter of ratification by the United States came up, the State Department demurred. At first it demurred over the inclusion of Articles 22–27 of the Declaration. But since most of these articles embody principles which are already written into United States law or supported by immemorial custom, the State Department’s objection to them seemed inexplicable. As Rayford Logan, a member of the United States National Commission for UNESCO, pointed out at the time, there is nothing revolutionary to American principles in the statement that “Everyone ... has a right to social security,” or in the statement that “Everyone has a right to education,” or in the statement that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for health.” No. The objection seemed to be to Article 23: “(1) Everyone has the right to work, to _free_ choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. (2) Everyone, _without any discrimination_, has the right to equal pay for equal work....” (Italics mine.) Once the Declaration was ratified, these clauses would have necessitated the establishment of a law no different in intent from the proposed F.E.P.C. But this is not the point that Mr. Edward W. Barrett, of the State Department, made in stating the objection to acceptance of the entire declaration. “Whereas,” he wrote, “a maximum degree of agreement exists (outside the Iron Curtain) on political and civil rights, there is no general agreement on economic and social rights. The laws and practices of the members of the United Nations differ widely on those rights as set forth in the Declaration.” It does not particularly matter, I suppose, that this amounts to saying that the United Nations had not agreed on what they obviously had agreed on; nor that no clear and sharp distinction (such as Mr. Barrett’s letter implies) can be drawn between political and civil rights on the one hand and economic and social rights on the other.