Debt Mission

Sailed from Cherbourg on the good ship Olympic the Belgian Debt Mission, the personnel of which is: ex-Premier Georges Theunis; Felician Cattier, head of La Banque d'Outremer; Baron Cartier de Marchienne, Belgian Ambassador to the U. S.; fenile Francqui, Vice Governeur de la Societe Generale de Belgique.

Experts accompanying the delegation were: J. B. Vincent, administrator of the Treasury; J. Warland, director of the public debt; Rene van Crombrugge, diplomat; Andre Terlinden, dlrecteur de la Sociote National de Credit a I'lndustrie; Robert Silvercruys, secretary-general to the delegation.

The Belgian debt to the U. S. is $480,503,983, and it was this sum that the U. S. asked Belgium to settle in its recent circular letter to its debtors (TIME, June 8, THE CABINET). Belgium was surprised to get this note because, according to an agreement with the late President Woodrow Wilson, British ex-Premier George and French ex-Premier Georges Clemenceau, she signed the Treaty of Versailles only on condition that her War debts be canceled.

Since President Wilson was in Europe, however, many anfractuosities have been discovered in the straight road which men mapped out for the World at Paris in 1919. One of them was the refusal of the U. S. to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, which meant that President Wilson's promise to Belgium was nullified. And the thought of many Belgians was expressed recently by Paul Hymans, Foreign Minister at the Versailles Conference, who asked in a session of Parliament at Brussels: "Who could have imagined in 1919 that the signature of President Wilson would today be disowned?"

A point to be noted, however, is that Britain and France were permitted to add what they had deducted from Belgium to their reparation bill against Germany. Whether that claim will ever be fully paid is debatable. But however much Belgium bled for the world, the attitude of the U. S. remains inexorable that all debts must be paid by the contracting parties and not balanced against, nor added to, a debt owing by another, which is what Britain and France have tried to do. Belgium has evidently decided to pay; although, in the words of Foreign Minister Vandervelde, leader of the Socialist Party, "this engagement [i.e. President Wilson's engagement to cancel the War debt of Belgium] is a moral engagement, which a great people cannot evade without moral damage to itself."