"Freedom of the Seas?"

Had the President of the U. S. been in London last week instead of on the Pacific, Mr. Roosevelt might have scanned with peculiar interest his morning papers.

"Great historical importance," the London Daily Mail told its readers, "attaches to the President's warning [to U. S. citizens that they sail on Italian or Ethiopian ships at their own risk] which is tantamount to a definite abandonment of the policy which led the United States into two wars --in 1812 and 1917--the policy of insistence on freedom of the seas and the right of neutrals to trade with belligerents."

"The American doctrine of freedom of the seas is dead," learned London's Morning Post from its Washington correspondent. Echoed the Manchester Guardian in a Manhattan dispatch: "It is generally accepted here that the United States has renounced the doctrine of freedom of the seas."

In Manhattan, through whose harbor passes 90% of the U. S. annual $100,000,000 trade with Italy, the Export Managers Club lunched in high dudgeon last week, resolved to trade & traffic with Italy to the best of their ability. Next that potent nexus of big shippers, railroads and steamship companies, the Conference of Port Development of the City of New York Inc. resolved that the President's warnings are "hasty and ill-advised," a "serious blow" to U. S. Commerce & Recovery. After becoming so heated that it referred to the President as "the daring young man on the international trapeze," the Conference butted its head against the Roosevelt Sphinx with vain requests by cable and telegram that the President should "clarify the situation by outlining future policies."

Freedom of the seas was one of President Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points and necessarily a wartime specialty of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Up for the silent President spoke in Washington last week Secretary of State Cordell Hull. To the Press good Mr. Hull handed mimeographed elaborations of an earlier interview with himself reading: "Speedy restoration of more full and stable trade conditions . . . is by far the most profitable objective for our people to visualize, in contrast with such risky and temporary trade as they might maintain with belligerent nations. I repeat that our objective is to keep this country out of war."

If this meant anything, it meant that the President was on the fence and to get him off became the surprising ambition last week of Mr. Hull's predecessor, Republican onetime Secretary of State Henry Lewis Stimson. Lawyer Stimson's well-meant "Stimson Doctrine," which persuaded virtually all nations not to recognize Japan's puppet state of Manchukuo (TIME, March 7, 1932), led the Great Powers down the deadest dead-end street of latter day diplomacy and in that street they are still stalled. Last week ingenious Statesman Stimson, in an open letter to the Press, clarioned: "All the elements for moral leadership for this crisis lie in the hands of the President. He has but to use them. ... I for one do not believe that . . . sordid attempts by Americans to profit out of the bloodshed and horrors of war represent the true feelings of the American people. If they do, God help us!"

In Washington the Italian Ambassador, for one. made the best of Sphinx Roosevelt's silence as to whether the President really means to scrap "freedom of the seas." Making no foolish attempt to explain or justify Italy's conquest in Ethiopia, ruddy-faced, debonair Ambassador Augusto Rosso confined himself to issuing through his Commercial Attache a discreet appeal to U. S. exporters' greed and enterprise: "Repercussions from any threatened economic measures against Italy will be negligible and their net result will be to afford opportunity to the United States to gain a more secure foothold in the Italian market . . . destined in the future to be of growing importance because of the fact that the present is one of those rare periods during which lasting commercial changes are in the making."

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