Scott Resolution

"Resolved, that the President is hereby requested to advise the House of Representatives, if not incompatible with the public interest--"1) Whether any nation or nations during the last few years have violated any treaties to which they and the United States are signatories;

"2) If so, what nation or nations, when, and in what manner. . . ."

This imposing little questionnaire, introduced in the House last week by California's liberal young Byron Nicholson Scott, provided Washington with a brief but lurid display of political fireworks against the cloudy sky of international relations.

Routine procedure in the case of Congressional resolutions concerning specific departments is to forward them promptly to the department concerned for comment before they are reported out of committee. Only relevant comment on the Scott Resolution the State Department could make would be to name Italy, Germany and Japan as treaty breakers--which cautious Secretary Cordell Hull, who was last week golfing at Pinehurst, N. C., has thus far been careful not to do. Byron Scott, who has been trying to get the Neutrality Act repealed, at least as it affects Spain, and who had attended a dinner party of consequential U. S. liberals and newspaper bigwigs at the Soviet Embassy earlier in the week, called at the White House before introducing his resolution. First guess was, therefore, that Franklin Roosevelt had inspired or at least approved his action as a means of justifying a new blast at totalitarian foreign policies in general.

First guess was at least partly wrong. The Scott Resolution did not force the State Department to lay down its face cards--which it may, nonetheless, do in the near future. On the other hand, something entirely different prompted Franklin Roosevelt to pick up some of his. Acting Secretary of State last week was Mr. Roosevelt's good friend Sumner Welles, who last summer met and greatly admired England's Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Last week, according to the most reliable reports, Mr. Chamberlain strongly urged his new friend, in the absence of canny Secretary Hull, to persuade Mr. Roosevelt to issue a statement approving the Anglo-Italian pact. In any case Mr. Roosevelt, who last fall at Chicago proposed a "quarantine for aggressor nations," felt obliged to tell a press conference: 1) that he had neither approved nor disapproved the Scott Resolution, and 2) that the U. S. "approved" the Anglo-Italian agreement as a "proof of the value of peaceful negotiations."

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