NEW YORK—When in Michigan the past week, I found myself reading the Detroit Free Press, trying to find out what that part of the country is particularly interested in.

One editorial discussed President Eisenhower's wisdom in giving the country information on his health and mentioned that, by his example, he was encouraging annual health checkups.

Then there was an editorial on Representative Walter H. Judd's proposal that the United Nations undertake a new type of aid program to fill a gap between technical assistance, which provides advice and persons to teach industrial know-how, and the actual furnishing of money and materials through the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Representative Judd's idea is that we should provide through voluntary contributions "intensive surveys of physical resources, train administrators and offer fundamental industrial research." The editorial did not say whether these contributions should come from individuals or governments.

Representative Judd thinks such a program would attract private investment to countries where there are new resources to be developed.

The Detroit Free Press believes that the important part of the program centers in Dr. Judd's remark that "private capital must be the real source of development in any nation." The reason the Free Press thinks this is a good program and hopes it will get U.N. consideration is because it feels such a plan would promote our economic system of capitalism. The newpaper feels that because of what it calls our give-away policy we have lost the respect of other nations.

The results, of course, would depend upon how this new plan would be adapted to conditions where it is tried out. It might help greatly in some areas and not so much in others. I doubt very much if we can expect to develop an exact counterpart of our economic system or our form of government in other areas of the world. Without question, both will have to be adjusted to meet the needs and situations of other countries.

To say that the sputniks have aroused interest in the Soviet Union is putting it mildly. It would have been well had we never lost our interest in the U.S.S.R., for then we would have been aware over the past years of the possibilities of development under the compulsory Communistic system.

Lack of knowledge about our adversaries is apt to produce surprises such as those we have just been treated to. And now it is hard to answer the multitude of questions which have built up in the minds of our people.

I spoke one night last week at Eastern Michigan College in Ypsilanti, which is only eight miles from Ann Arbor where I began my tour not quite a week earlier. Ypsilanti is a small but attractive city with a number of industries and two colleges. It is only 30 miles from Detroit and, therefore, a part of the great automobile center of our country.

I also visited one of the first schools in this country for retarded children. The school not only cares for the mentally retarded, but for spastics and post-polio cases as well, and I was told that nearly all the children here are able to acquire something from education.