"Only by Radical Measures...."

INTERNATIONAL

"Only by Radical Measures. . .."

At Lausanne, where peace conferences have been held since 1300 A.D., where Charles Dickens wrote Dombey & Son and where three brothers of Napoleon met as exiled Kings after the Battle of Waterloo, there met last week the Lausanne Conference on Reparations & War Debts.

Strictly speaking--though no one spoke strictly--the Conference met not in Lausanne, high above placid Lac Leman, but in suburban Ouchy at the water's brim, in the Grand Ballroom of the Hotel Beau-Rivage. Around an oblong table the delegates of 14 nations* faced each other with a great calm. Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, Premier Edouard Herriot, Chancellor Franz von Papen and the rest knew that their action must be to postpone action, adopt a temporary European moratorium and lay plans for drawing the U. S. into general cancellation of Reparations & Debts--after the U. S. elections next November.

In the manner of Governor Roosevelt quoting great Democrats of the dead past, Prime Minister MacDonald opened the Conference with a speech quoting the Basle Committee's urgent advice last year that "adjustment of all intergovernmental debts to the existing troubled situation of the world . . . should take place without delay if new disasters are to be avoided" (TIME, Jan. 4). A great orator, Scot MacDonald gave new freshness to this stale, sound advice by rolling out such exhortations as:

"It is the essence of our task that we must act with speed! . . . Despair is a fortress which must be carried by storm and cannot be conquered by long siege." Putting on sham speed, the Conference adopted at once an agreement to "reserve . . . during the period of the conference . . . the execution of payments due to the powers participating." In effect this extended the European end of the Hoover Moratorium (which is to expire June 30) for as long as the delegates care to keep the Conference going.

Von Papen. Since this was the first appearance of Lieut.-Colonel Franz von Papen at a conference with a really big C./- the new German Chancellor was the focus of world attention at Lausanne last week. Soon cables carried the news that the titular head of Germany's reactionary "Cabinet of Monocles"-- is not nearly so domineering as expected, in fact is not domineering at all. London newspapers which recently scare-headed EX-SPY BECOMES GERMAN CHANCELLOR could not deny last week that Lieut.-Colonel Franz von Papen speaks with a soft intonation, sits for minutes at a time pensively fondling the top of his cane and appears to the casual eye incapable of plotting in 1915 to blow up Canada's Weiland Canal.

While shutters clicked Chancellor von Papen offered a light to Premier Herriot and a movietone recorded a chat between them and Prime Minister Mac-Donald in the garden of the Beau-Rivage. Later, lenses caught von Papen in his bathing suit, stepping into Lac Leman. Meanwhile his retinue of 60 Germans (one of the largest delegations) denied by the hour that the "Cabinet of Monocles" has any intention of promoting a Dictatorship or a Monarchist restoration in Germany.

"A dictatorship," said Dictatorial General von Schleicher in Berlin last week, "would be a nuisance."

Keynotes by Lausanne statesmen which revealed how far apart they were last week, except on the point that Europe must present a united front to the U. S.:

Chancellor von Papen: "Reparations have become abhorrent. Experience excludes the possibility of recommencing payments. Reparations do not reconstruct, they destroy!"

Premier Herriot: "Reparations are an integral part of the European economic system. . . . We wish to reserve the future and follow the advice of the experts whom we have consulted." This advice, M. Herriot continued, shows among other things that if the present Reparations burden on the German railways were wiped out by cancellation their fixed charges would be reduced so much below the fixed charges borne by French railways, that German goods could be delivered from producer to the frontier at far cheaper rates than corresponding French goods.

Chancellor Neville Chamberlain of the British Exchequer: "So convinced are we that only by radical measures . . . can . . . the wheels of credit . . . be . . . induced once more to revolve freely, that we should be prepared to take our share in a general wiping of the slate, provided all the other governments would do the same."

Over the weekend Premier Herriot dashed up to Paris, talked volubly to reporters, let himself be quoted thus: "We succeeded at Lausanne in avoiding discussions of principles . . . from which an immediate breakdown of the Conference could have arisen."

Hoover Plan. Meanwhile at Geneva, at the far end of Lac Leman, the Disarmament Conference and its committees adjourned last week, to meet again after "private conversations" have taken place between the Great Powers concerned. A plan, said to have been devised by President Hoover last January and held in reserve until last week was submitted to the chief delegates by U. S. Ambassador to Belgium Hugh Simons Gibson. Simple, the Hoover plan is this: Let each nation determine for itself and announce to the Conference what weapons & effectives it needs for purposes of maintaining peace & order within its own frontiers. Let weapons & effectives above this minimum be designated as "surplus." Let the nations negotiate afresh to reduce surpluses all around.

Just prior to adjournment of the Disarmament Conference its President, famed "Uncle Arthur" Henderson, now a bitter foe of his onetime friend Prime Minister MacDonald, passionately denounced "the peddling of hellish instruments of murder" (i. e. armaments) in peace time by the Great Powers (see below).

"Partly with weapons we had sold to the Turks," cried Mr. Henderson, "a holocaust was inflicted upon the flower of the British Army at Gallipoli! That is a kind of paradox, my friends, against which the conscience of mankind is in revolt!"

Since the deliberations & conversations at Lausanne & Geneva were expected to go on indefinitely, smart young Robert Thompson Bell, press officer for the U. S. statesmen now in Switzerland, last week took a villa for the summer strategically located on the lake shore at Celigny, between Geneva and Lausanne.

*Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Jugo slavia, Rumania, Greece, Bulgaria, Portugal, Japan. fOne Paris correspondent called the Lausanne Conference "the fiftieth since the World War."

** Dominated behind the Berlin scenes by Lieut.

/- General Kurt von Schleicher, Minister of Defense who forced out Chancellor Briining (TIME, June 13).

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