Hoover, Napoleon & Hearst

Because President Hoover protested the new Franco-British agreement to stand together on War Debt, he was flayed last week by the entire conservative Press of France. The palm for wanton insult and abuse went easily to La Liberte, organ of the Bonapartists who would like to see again a French Empire.

"Verily, Pontius Pilate was not more cynical or more odious," said La Liberte, referring to the President's protest. "What was the Lausanne Conference if not a direct and logical consequence of the Hoover Moratorium? Does this government, which obeys gangsters, which capitulates helpless before thieves and assassins of babies in the cradle, dare to assume such a height of moral authority that it thinks it can dictate to Europe and France? Americans are the only race which passed directly from barbarism to decadence without knowing civilization."

What Napoleon Bonaparte was to France, William Randolph Hearst is to himself and would like to be to the U. S. public. Last week he hired a nation-wide radio hook-up for a sermon to U. S. citizens on "The Debt Cancellation Conspiracy." Shrilled he:

"My friends, let us be altruistic, and even pacifistic if you please. Let us be patriotic, as we always are, but let us not be sentimentally idiotic, as we sometimes are! . . .

"Why should we unpatriotically discriminate against our own people in order to be over-generous to foreign peoples, who are not even grateful for the benefactions they have already received and who will use the advantage we give them in commercial and industrial competition to build up their own prosperity and destroy ours? . . .

"These European nations have entered into what they call a 'gentlemen's agreement' to force their dishonest debt cancellation policy upon the United States.

"But how can there be a 'gentlemen's agreement' between welchers?

"How can there be gentlemen whose word is worthless?

"How can there be gentlemen whose HONOR is worthless?

"Let us not use so honorable a phrase for so dishonorable an agreement, lest we utterly discredit the word gentleman and make it a term of contumely and contempt.

"Let us call this secret gang compact by something more descriptive of its true character.

"Let us call it plainly a crooked conspiracy by European confidence men and their American confederates to rob the American people!"

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