Not So Blue Danube

James Ramsay MacDonald, inert for the past few weeks nursing an eyeball on which his doctor had to operate for glaucoma, emerged last week to make his favorite political move. He called a Conference this time of Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy. Subject: the Blue Danubian States.

This year the small countries through which mighty Mother Danube (yellow in color) flows 1,725 miles from the Alps to the Black Sea are desperately blue. They have reared fantastic tariffs and embargoes against each other's trade, made it a crime to export their own currencies, and generally hamstrung themselves while trying to hamstring each other.

For Austria the logical way out of all this woe seemed a customs union with Germany, but that France forbade (TIME, March 30, 1931). Having taken candy away from Baby Austria, it was up to Big France to suggest some other nourishment and this Premier Andre Tardieu recently did. He enraged Big Germany and Italy by suggesting a customs union under French tutelage of five Danube states: Austria. Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Jugoslavia and Rumania.

Mr. MacDonald. a skilled pacifier, took upon himself last week the labor of convincing Germany and Italy that M. Tardieu's plan is not too disadvantageous to them, or at least that France, now at the zenith of her wealth and power, will permit no other solution of the Danubian Question. It must be solved to keep the Balkans from getting too chaotically blue.

In Paris two opposed schools of editorial thought had Premier Tardieu vexed and delighted by Prime Minister MacDonald's intervention. English papers opined that French "precipitancy" had blighted the Danubian Union's chances of success. at the outset, but that British "deliberate action" might yet reconcile everyone. If Premier Tardieu was vexed, as a section of the French press stubbornly insisted, his words in addressing the French Chamber on foreign policy last week certainly concealed his thoughts.

"I wish to emphasize, Messieurs," he said, "my satisfaction that the custom of holding conversations with England has been resumed. Intimate collaboration between our two countries will always be the best guarantee of peace and stability in Europe."

In Berlin. Chancellor Bruning accepted Prime Minister MacDonald's invitation to the Danubian Conference but requested that it not be held until after the German Presidential election April 10.

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