Champions of Democracy

In Europe last week. Democracy had not lost her voice. Three times, in as many countries, men gathered to do her homage and to apply their heels to dictators.

In the Luxembourg Palace in Paris, normally the home of the French Senate, delegates to the 33rd Conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Union met. Filing into the hall came delegates from 23 countries,* ten less, as a result of the replacement of parliamentary governments by dictatorships and corporative states, than were represented at the last Paris meeting in 1927.

Little noticed by the world, the Union, founded by British and French parliamentarians in 1888 takes itself quite seriously, claims to have germinated the idea of The Permanent Court of International Justice, the League of Nations. Press Agent Robinet de Clery ballyhoos the Union as a more universal institution than the League, because Japan and the U. S., League nonmembers, and totalitarian Italy which finds the League distasteful, regularly send delegates. Germany and Soviet Russia, however, did not attend.

Juan Corominas, spokesman for the Spanish Left, threw the meeting into an uproar by charging that "Germany and Italy, by their intervention in Spain, are trying to grab advantageous positions for themselves." This drew howls from the Italians. The presiding officer banged with his gavel, reprimanded Corominas with the admonition that the Union takes no stand on political conflicts. The Spanish delegate hotly replied that he was not taking sides, he was simply stating facts.

P: In Poland last week, where a ten-day farmers' strike followed by further protests against the dictatorial rule of Poland's boss Marshal Edward Smigly-Rydz, has piled up an impressive casualty list of dead and wounded (TIME, Sept. 6), the revolting farmers found an unexpected ally. From the obscurity of his self-imposed exile in Merges, Switzerland, 76-year-old Pianist Ignace Jan Paderewski cracked out a manifesto:

"Totalitarianism is alien to Polish psychology. It will be impossible to introduce this system without provoking civil war."

To the peasants' delight he urged immediate elections, the abolition of concentration camps and the return from exile in Czechoslovakia of Wincenty Witos, one-time Premier, founder and head of the Peasant Party.

Dictator Smigly-Rydz, knowing that Pianist-Statesman Paderewski had conferred in Switzerland with Witos and other opponents of the military "Colonels' clique" that dominates Warsaw, immediately suppressed every Warsaw paper that attempted to print the Paderewski manifesto (which compelled the secret circulation of the manifesto hand-to-hand), and replied to Paderewski's demand for the cessation of reprisals against the Peasant Party with a new crop of arrests.

P: At Rumania's Sinaia last week the Foreign Ministers of Rumania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia (the Little Entente) met over a case of champagne for their annual get together. This year's meeting was crucial. Dictator Mussolini for months has been trying to weld Yugoslavia to his Rome-Berlin axis, to smash thei Little Entente's solidarity and isolate "pink" Czechoslovakia, a Fascist headache because of her mutual assistance pact with Soviet Russia. Glowing with good food and drink, the diplomats spiked Mussolini's hopes by reaffirming their policy of sticking together, approving a hands-off policy in Spain, dodging the question of recognition of the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, and loudly restating their loyalty to the League of Nations. Rumania's Foreign Minister Victor Antonescu went out of his way to state:

"Far from disapproving of the [Czech-Soviet] treaty I look with favor upon it. . . . Moreover I should like to emphasize our friendship for France which nothing can destroy."

In Paris this statement was hailed joyously as France's "first major diplomatic victory since Adolf Hitler came into power."

*U. S. delegates were headed by Senate Majority Leader Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky, included Senators Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee.

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