"Important for Democracy"

Without becoming fatuous, President Roosevelt's grey and graceful little Special Ambassador Norman Hezekiah Davis manages to stay optimistic and well-liked year after year on his patient rounds of a Europe now fast deteriorating into strife. In London last week he was back in the game of Conference. Twenty-two nations had sent bigwig delegations to what was technically a meeting of the Sugar section of the World Economic Conference of 1933 which technically is still in an "adjournment." Away back when it used to meet, the name of James Ramsay MacDonald still rang big, and last week this hoary Scot was again in the chairman's seat of what looked like a full-size International Conference of the sort he loved so well as British Prime Minister. Once more, and perhaps for the last time, the imposing Locarno Room of the Foreign Office echoed to his noble Scottish burr. Mr. MacDonald today holds the British Cabinet sinecure of Lord President of the Council at $10,000 yearly, is slated to be raised to the peerage soon and retire on a pension of $10,000. Severe eye trouble caused him to strain with visible pain last week as he read a gracious speech void of importance--in the true sense a swan song by a once great man once greatly beloved.

The Delegate of the Philippines, Senator Felipe Buencamino, realizing that Sugar was in no sense the point of this Sugar Conference and that he could have no possible role in the hotel-room sessions of the Great Powers and their European satellites, left London early Thursday morning for what he called a "little Paris weekend." Ambassador Davis, Foreign Secretary Eden, French Minister of National Economy Charles Spinasse, German Ambassador von Ribbentrop and Dutch Premier Dr. Hendrikus Colijn talked about lowering tariffs, applying brakes to the Rearmament race, somehow dealing with Europe's debts to the U. S. before there is another war, and causing overproduction of such commodities as Sugar to subside. Because Japan and Italy had declined to send delegates and the atmosphere of London today is one of panic-Rearmament; because herioc head-scratching has not shown how to deal with the debts (except to arrange at the proper time some technical humbug permitting borrowing to recommence if the U. S. investor will lend); and because the Chadbourne Sugar Restriction Plan has cracked up with overproduction rampant, there was interest last week in the so-called "Oslo Group" led by Premier Colijn of The Netherlands.

Oslo is the capital of Norway and there is a placid affinity of minds among Netherlanders, Norwegians, Luxembourgers, Danes, Belgians, Swedes and Finns. These neighbors are so good and so unable to defend themselves that they recently decided at The Hague to revive the Oslo Convention of 1930 under which they were all to have lowered tariffs among each other. In principle the Great Powers too are strong for such good neighborliness, in practice their statesmen feel helpless to down either tariffs or rearmament, and so last week they played up the Oslo Group benignly.

Sugar inspired Ambassador Davis to make the Conference's only much-quoted statement of the week: "I have been on many missions, but this is the sweetest one I have ever had.... If we could only reach one agreement ... it would be important in this crucial period of world history to Democracy . . . showing that 22 nations can sit down and reach some agreement."

Democratic Britain and France were reported trying to get Democrat Davis to wend his appeasing way to Berlin and Rome, beard Hitler and Mussolini with blandishments. The Paris newspundit Pertinax suggested that the Great Powers might succeed if President Roosevelt would find a way to permit Germany and Italy to borrow hugely in return for agreements by Berlin and Rome to cease arriving and give concessions "such as to involve the practical disappearance of Hitlerism and Fascism"--this being Pertinax'?, sly way of saying that Mr. Davis faces the supreme challenge to his optimism. In London David Lloyd George's Council of Action for Peace and Reconstruction scored the Home Government for not making more of Democrat Davis' "suggestion for co-operation," predicting "an end to all hope of American intervention" if President Roosevelt's representative is unheeded.

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