Pact of Peace

Though the German Cabinet crisis continued last week, with the resigned Marx Cabinet still functioning ad interim (TIME, Dec. 27), an important Italo-German treaty of arbitration was signed in Rome by Signor Mussolini and the German Ambassador, Baron von Neurath.

Foreign Minister Dr. Gustav Stresemann did not journey to Rome to sign the treaty, lest an impression be created in France that it is a really important rapprochement. Instead Dr. Stresemann, than whom no stateman in Europe is more astute, remained at Berlin and encouraged his party news organs to pronounce the treaty "purely an arbitration pact, and exactly like those already concluded between Germany and Holland, Switzerland, Norway. . . ."

The new instrument is, in fact, a simple promise that for the next ten years Germany and Italy will submit their mutual disputes to a mutual arbitral board, and, if that fails, to the World Court. The application of the treaty is, however, carefully restricted from interfering with the Locarno Pacts, or the League Covenant.

The best proof that the new treaty is all it purports to be and no more was the placid silence of the French press concerning it last week.