"Peculiar Circumstances"

The London Conference became even more like a storage battery, last week, with Secretary of State Henry Lewis Stimson still the negative pole, and with ideas and proposals crackling and shooting off like sparks from the positive pole, Prime Minister Andre Tardieu of France!

How great a victory this was for President Herbert Hoover not every U. S. citizen realized. Yet a month ago the conference was threatened with failure at the start because the French had sent out a diplomatic note showing extreme reluctance to cooperate (TIME, Jan. 6). In Paris it was freely said that Messrs. Mac-Donald and Hoover had made a secret pact beside the rushing Rapidan which they would impose on France. This she must block. M. Tardieu. bristling, repeated on the eve of the London Conference the same brusque exclamation he uttered before The Hague Conference (.TIME, Jan. 13 to 27): "France will not be afraid to say no!"

But one cannot say no to a negative. As day after day passed, with Mr. Stimson proposing nothing, merely repeating what everyone knew (that the U. S. would hold Great Britain to her pledge of parity), the French attitude began to change. Last week Tout Paris was happy because her editors were saying that M. Tardieu was leading the conference--and in fact he was.

By negative leadership, by the sound engineering principle of a Hoover vacuum cleaner, the sulky, suspicious French had been literally sucked into cooperation, enthusiasm.

Lossie Loon. Of course the figures cut by Statesmen Stimson and MacDonald last week were not heroic--for heroism is a positive quality.

They appeared almost absurd at Third Plenary Session, held in St. James's palace for no other purpose than to allow Statesman Stimson to propose the creation of a "Steering Committee." He did propose it. The motion carried. All seemed well, and the press had a more favorable tone because 78 correspondents had been allowed to sit in on this stuffed-shirt session --a concession which Mr. Stimson had fought for and won to still complaints in the U. S. Senate about "secrecy" (TIME, Feb. 3).

So far so good. But within a few hours Mr. _ MacDonald discovered that all the British dominions demanded representation on the "steering committee." This would have packed it with a majority of Britons, to which the other powers would not consent. In vain Scot MacDonald tried to reason with the representatives of Canada, South Africa, the Irish Free State et at. They stood on their rights and their dignity, reminded the Lossie Loon* that he is Prime Minister not of the whole Empire, but only of "His Majesty's Government in Great Britain."

Powerless to oppose the dominions, powerless to oppose the powers, the Lossie Loon was obliged to nullify the one and only positive move made by Statesman Stimson since the opening of the conference. At Mr. MacDonald's request, with Mr. Stimson consenting, the business of the "Steering Committee" was entrusted to the "committee of the whole"--this latter being nothing more or less than the ordinary line-up of the conference.

While Jean Frenchman laughed at the poor Lossie Loon, an equally odd figure was cut by Statesman Stimson. He espied a cameraman kneeling to snap his picture through a hedge.

"Come out!"

Sheepishly the cameraman came out.

"Now kneel down in front of me," commanded Statesman Stimson, at the same time bringing a camera into focus. "Kneel down, and while you take a picture of me I shall take a picture of you in that position."

Snap, snap.

When news of this reached Paris, the commonality of Frenchmen either tapped their foreheads significantly or exclaimed with rapture: "Voila un original!"

Grandi v. Tardieu. So young is Signor Dino Grandi, 35, that he has grown a beard like an Egyptian mummy's to achieve dignity as Italian Foreign Minister. Last week the beard waggled angrily. Against the will of France, Italy sought to impose on the conference this procedure: agreement should first be reached on the ratios of naval strength in which the powers would stand; secondly, each power should announce its total tonnage needs.

Spade-bearded Dino Grandi hoped that this procedure would work out as follows: the conference would first decide that France and Italy should stand in a naval ratio of parity. Secondly, when the time came for each nation to announce its needs, France would have to lay her cards on the table before Italy, for the simple reason that the conference procedure is alphabetical and F comes before I. When his turn came, Signer Grandi, already assured of parity with France, already aware of her maximum demands, would simply repeat with a virtuous air Signor Benito Mussolini's old saying, repeated at every conference for years, "Italy stands ready to reduce to any common minimum, even the lowest" (TIME, Jan. 27). Thus the blame for maintaining heavy armaments would be shifted neatly and wholly on to France.

To Signor Grandi's positive demands, Prime Minister Andre Tardieu of France was not afraid to shout "No!" ten times more positively. He was also able to convince Italy that he had the silent backing of Britain and the U. S. Defeated in the first round, Signor Grandi withdrew his demand that ratios and total tonnages come first on the agenda, but saved the face of Signor Mussolini by a voluble oration to the effect that Italy "reserves" these points and will not join in any agreement reached by the conference until they have been settled.

Flushed by his first victory, driving, kinetic M. Tardieu then presented the conference with his plan of procedure. When this had been haggled over and slightly modified, James Ramsay MacDonald said poetically to reporters: "The partition between our position and the French is now so thin that if you should place a candle on one side you could see it from the other."

P. T. F. Labeled Proposition Transactionelle Francaise (French basis for bargaining) the Tardieu proposal was handed out to all delegates at a meeting of the "committee of the whole." French expert Rene Massigli, who helped Tardieu draft the P. T. F. (as Tardieu helped Clemenceau draft the Treaty of Versailles), explained that its major points are: 1) The conference should set a maximum total of "global" tonnage of "floating material," up to which each nation would have a theoretical right to build; 2) In striving for agreement as to actual building and ratios the method should be to consider war boats in six main classes, the classification being primarily in terms of gun calibers not tons (i. e. two ships, both of exactly 8,000 tons, but one having six-inch guns and the other eight-inch, would fall into different classes); 3) Within the limit of the total tonnage assigned by the conference to a given nation, that nation might upon giving appropriate notice, transfer part of its ships from one class to another --might for example mount eight-inch guns on a ship that had previously carried six-inchers.

In presenting the P. T. P., jaunty, positive M. Tardieu said that in 1942 France proposes to have a navy of 804.000 tons, of which 175.000 tons of battleships and 60,000 tons of aircraft carriers are already covered by the Washington Treaty. The other 569,000 tons, France would divide thus: large cruisers 120,000 tons; light cruisers and destroyers 200,000; submarines 124,000; miscellaneous 55,000. These figures, unsensational, were the only real cards laid on the conference table last week.

Correspondents were told that Negative Stimson would soon follow the lead of Positive Tardieu by laying down a similar hand for the U. S. when enough cards are on the table there can begin, not the game, but a shuffle and first deal. "Pertinax" (Andre Geraud), pungent correspondent of L'Echo de Paris, wired to his paper: "Secretary Stimson was overheard to re-mark : 1 wish this conference would waste a good deal more time!' "

* So his neighbors in Lossiemouth, Scotland, affectionately call him.

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