Second-Hand Vassalage

Because the Naval Conference stood adjourned last week--while France chose a new cabinet (see p. 24), while Dino Grandi was cheered in Rome as he reported on the Conference to Benito Mussolini; and while Japanese voted to keep their old cabinet (see col. 1)--the only naval decision of international importance was made at Washington by President Herbert Hoover.

It was not announced in words so definite that they cannot be modified, but correspondents at the White House all heard that the President: 1) will not agree to the bargain proposed by France (TIME, Feb. 24), that if the U. S. and Britain sign a pact guaranteeing French security the French delegation would cut their demand for a navy of 725,000 tons by 20%; 2) the President will not agree, in diplomatic language to "implement" the Kellogg Peace Pact, or, in plain English, to create mechanism for the purpose of making its pious pledge of peace enforcible.

So far as they went Mr. Hoover's decisions were a praiseworthy echo of U. S. public opinion; but they did not change the fact that, if France does not recede from her demand, Britain will increase hers, the U. S. must increase theirs to maintain Anglo-U. S. "parity," and the net result would be to launch the London Conference on a program of increasing naval strengths all round.

In this depressing hour, with news from the conference slack, Chicago's blatant Tribune, fantastically profitable and self-styled "The World's Greatest Newspaper," committed what is probably the journalistic atrocity of the year, headlined above a front page story: "MORGAN'S HAND IS SEEN BEHIND U. S. NAVAL DEAL. Parity surrender is still a mystery."

Though the U. S. delegation is clinging to nothing more tightly than to "parity," the Tribune charged that the President's parity figures actually represent a "surrender" to Great Britain, continued:

"It will be recalled that Vice President Curtis, on the eve of his nomination in Kansas City, said that Hoover, if elected, would take the next steamer for England.

"Those who, like Vice President Curtis . . ., accused President Hoover of being pro-British on the basis of his long residence under the British flag, are reading in the Stimson proposals substantiation of their suspicions. . . .

"They envisage the Morgan group of international bankers as a financial and political dictatorship, which rules America as a European satrapy.

"With particular suspicion do they view Morgan, banker of Great Britain during the War, who has his London house in Grosvenor Square and his English country seat, Wall Hall, at Watford. What is more natural, they think, than . . . that the Morgan group, with its vast investments in British shipping held in vassalage to the British Government, should favor American naval surrender, perpetuating British mastery of the seas?

"They think they perceive in the attitude of President Hoover proof that he is no longer at odds with the Morgan group that opposed his nomination. . . .

"To those inspired by such suspicions a particular significance is attached to the fact that the American case in the London Naval Conference is in the hands of Henry L. Stimson, a protege of Elihu Root, who recently surrendered to British terms for our admission to the World Court; of Ambassador Charles G. Dawes, who floated the first British loan in Chicago at the beginning of the War, and who was the Morgan group's candidate for the presidential nomination at Kansas City; of Dwight W. Morrow, a former partner in the house of Morgan; of Charles Francis Adams, whose daughter is the wife of Henry Morgan and once lived in J. P. Morgan's London house; of Senator David A. Reed, apostle of Andrew Mellon, who is financially affiliated with Morgan, and who has been classed a pro-British ever since he sponsored the National Origins Emigration Restriction doubling the English quota."

"The World's Greatest Newspaper'' thus raised nonsense to the higher power, for nothing can be more nonsensical than to picture J. P. Morgan as the "vassal" of James Ramsay MacDonald, the pliant chain by means of which Mr. MacDonald is imagined to hold President Hoover bound hand and foot in second-hand vassalage.

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