Arms & the Masses

Wherever he goes, industrious, well-groomed William Philip Simms, Foreign Editor of the Scripps-Howard press, seems to instill a love of peace, perhaps because he is famed for prophecies of gloom and war. He interviewed Dictator Benito Mussolini month ago and that modern Caesar, instead of growling fresh warning to the world, suggested dovelike that President Roosevelt should arrange an arms limitation conference. Last week Mr. Simms reported that he had seen Premier Leon Blum in Paris. Gazing upon the trees and lawns of Matignon Palace he had heard the gospel of peace preached once more. Europe, declared the French Premier, is on the verge of catastrophe because everywhere arms are being piled up. Premier Blum's solution: let every interested power "make public their armament programs, together with the cost thereof"; let them then "agree not to exceed these programs."

This was no startling suggestion; it had been endorsed, if not effected, by every Disarmament Conference since the Treaty of Versailles. And everyone knows that Europe's credit, especially France's, is already badly strained by Rearmament. But a certain freshness of point and purpose was lent to Premier Blum's remarks by echoes from the conference of the International Labor Office, meeting at Geneva. There, representing President Roosevelt and U. S. Labor, Assistant Secretary of Labor Edward Francis McGrady sounded off: "I predict that the world's working men and women will not forever be content to stand by while civilized living is being sacrificed on the altar of armaments, nor longer be willing to forge a means of their own destruction."

French Delegate Leon Jouhaux struck the same note. To Premier Blum the voice of goatee-waggling Leon Jouhaux, epicure, onetime longshoreman, is even more a master's voice than is John L. Lewis' to Franklin Roosevelt. Leon Jouhaux bosses not half but all of France's organized labor front, key force in the Popular Front whose votes keep Premier Blum in power. Roared Leon Jouhaux at Geneva: "You cannot on one hand prepare for war and on the other develop social justice."

Boomed Delegate Arthur Hayday for British Labor: "Even if war is avoided, what is going to happen when the armaments boom bursts? . . . There are sufficient democratic nations in the world to come to an understanding whereby they could impose peace. . . ."

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