Action!

Like the sea's ebb and flow, the spirit of naval disarmament rises and falls with the coming and going of governments. Last week President Hoover sent it billowing up the beach of popular expectation with fresh momentum.

The President went, as custom required, to the Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day. By custom he delivered a speech on Peace. Contrary to custom he said something pointed. His argument: The Kellogg treaty for the renunciation of war is a "declaration" of "faith and idealism" which must be followed by "action." It must mean "all armament hereafter shall be used only for defense." But "we are still borne on the tide of competitive building. . . . Fear and suspicion . . . will never disappear until we can turn this tide toward actual reduction." He insisted on finding a "rational yardstick" for naval comparisons, and added: "Limitation upward is not our goal but actual reduction ... to lowered levels."

These points, now pressed by the President in person, were the same points he had given Ambassador Hugh Simons Gibson to press at Geneva. To bring his meaning closer to earth, he next day let his Secretary of State voice further argument. Statesman Stimson distributed to newsmen a brief, carefully-timed statement which reminded U. S. taxpayers that unless world navies are further restricted, the U. S. in the next 15 years will carry out a naval building and replacement program costing $1,170,000,000. "And if it proceeds, other nations will be impelled to follow suit." The program includes the navy's 70-odd auxiliary ship plan, plus capital ship replacements under the Washington arms treaty.

The U. S. government tried and failed to limit naval armaments with the British Conservative government under Prime Minister Baldwin. Destiny seemed to be working in President Hoover's behalf, for at the very moment of his Arlington speech, the Baldwin government was being voted down by the British electorate. Past experience has shown that Britain's Labor Party, now on the threshold of power, is less suspicious of naval reduction than the Tories.

A third thing the President did to set the stage for renewed international negotiations. He gave up his customary weekend fishing trip, called in Secretary of the Navy Charles Francis Adams to learn what progress U. S. experts were making in developing a "yardstick." Through Secretary Adams he ordered the Navy's 1931 budget estimates held up at the department instead of being forwarded to the Treasury. The President postponed the estimates for two months in the expectation that within that time a new basis for naval reduction will be found.

P: Dr. Rudolph Krohne of Berlin last week asked the President to attend the International Advertising Association's convention in that city next August. Instead of accepting, President Hoover wrote a letter commending advertising ethics to Charles Clark Younggreen, the association's president. Mr. Younggreen, overjoyed, made the letter public two months before the convention met.