"Bell's At It Again"

While Washington newsgatherers have lounged in the Spring sun on the White House steps, cablegrams from London signed "Bell" have been passing, unknown to the loungers, into the executive offices. Had they known, the White House correspondents would probably have said scornfully: "Old Bell's at it again." But last week, when the Bell cablegrams were first publicly known about, it was too late to say that. It was official news that Ramsay MacDonald, England's new

Prime Minister, hoped to be able to visit the U. S. this summer with Canada's MacKenzie King, to have a talk with President Hoover (see p. 11). It is also official that Edward Price Bell, dean of the foreign staff of the Chicago Daily News, had "sold" the idea, first to Prime Minister King, then to Mr. MacDonald. Among journalists, Edward Price Bell is a Pundit, not only a writer and interpreter but also a molder, a creator of news. He is heir to the dream of the late, great Victor Fremont Lawson, builder of the Chicago Daily News, who 30 years ago conceived a worldwide foreign service which was to be "the handmaiden of state craft." Men who worked abroad for Journalist Lawson had to be diplomatists as well as reporters. They were to aid in interpreting countries one to the other, for to Journalist Lawson all nations needed only to be known to be beloved. Properly to interpret a nation it might be necessary sometimes to persuade its statesmen to words or deeds not originally their own. The Lawson idea thus combined pedagogy with journalism. As executed by its chief agent, Pundit Bell, the Lawson idea has often raised resentment in the breasts of other, more shirtsleeve newsmen. From his contacts with statesmen, Pundit Bell long ago contracted the habit of talking like one. Where a few journalists are gathered together, he unconsciously addresses them as an oracle from some other world. There is something obnoxious to workaday correspondents about a man who conceives the Press to have more than the communicative function. A Bell feat, and the significance attached by him to it, in the year (1924) before Publisher Lawson's death, were typical of what newsmen mean when they say: "Old Bell's at it again."

Jointly concerned with Mr. Lawson over the troubled condition of Europe, Mr. Bell got "from each of the most responsible officials [England's MacDonald, Italy's Mussolini, France's Poincare, Germany's Marx] ... a statement designed to correct existing misunderstanding, allay inflammation, point the way to reconstruction and define the principles of an established international accord." After these interviews, Mr. Bell discerned that the peoples of the Pacific needed the mediation of the Chicago Daily News. He sped thither and repeated his procedure with Canada's Mackenzie King, Japan's Kato and Shidehara, China's Tang-Shao- Yi, Leonard Wood and Manuel L. Quezon of the Philippines. The results of 36,000 miles of travel, months of interviewing, were published in a Bell book called World Chancellories, which its author described as "without prototype in breadth of conception and thoroughness of execution." The Bell work in Europe aided, explained Pundit Bell, in spreading the sentiment which resulted in the Pact of Locarno. "As to the Pacific," said he, "the Daily News found it enveloped in war fog and left it clear."

Edward Price Bell, 60, father of two sons and a daughter, lives in the Dawesian town of Evanston, Ill., when not visiting the world's chancellories. From 1900 to 1923 he was the Daily News London correspondent. He covered the World War and was the first correspondent ever to interview a British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Always an advocate of peace, he lectures to English schoolboys on Anglo-American relations, to U. S. boys on the need for U. S. participation in peace organizations. He is tall, spare, a little bent, a little bald, tanned, serene, almost Oriental-looking. Eloquent, amicable, he likes to stand with feet spread, thin arms folded, and talk with the ghost of a British accent about the other side of the world.