THE TURMOIL AT GENEVA

THE crisis at Geneva, which is at its height as these lines are written, overshadows all other European news, national or international, at the moment, and justifies, even at the risk of repetition, a restatement of press opinion from the countries principally concerned. Speaking for France, Le Temps thinks anyone naïve 'who imagines that Germany has endorsed the policies of Geneva and Locarno in the interests of general peace,' and argues that the Powers have a perfect right to make Germany's admission to the Council subject to the reorganization of that body. 'It is a question that has been discussed at Geneva and in the press for more than two years. Is n't it quite logical to take advantage of Germany's application to arrange the matter and to give the Council its final constitution?' Against this thesis Berliner Tageblatt, which is a pro-League daily, says:

The constitution of the League Council is not the point at issue. It is possible that the Council should be reformed; but hither

to one principle has been unquestioned: the permanent members were to be Great Powers. This automatically involved the recognition that Germany would receive a permanent seat when she joined the League. The same thing would occur if the Soviet Union or the United States were to become members. But the suggestion to give Poland, Spain, or Brazil permanent seats involves changing the

fundamental idea of the Council.

Frankfurter Zeitung, another Liberal organ, adopts the same position:—

Disregarding the anti-German tendencies that have unquestionably influenced some of our country's enemies. the whole dispute is over two distinct questions which have not the slightest connection with each other: the fulfillment of a promise unconditionally made to Germany to give her a permanent seat in the Council; and the reorganization of the Council itself, which has been agitated for several years by those who do not like its present constitution. The first point we cannot discuss. The German Government must insist that the promise be fulfilled. . . . The only object for which the special meeting of the Council was called is to receive Germany into the League. That meeting should not raise questions that lie outside its

original purpose. The reorganization of the Council should be postponed until the next regular session, which occurs under the constitution in September, when every member of the League will be prepared to have its say.

Spain's attitude is thus voiced by El Sol, a Liberal-Nationalist daily of Madrid:

Two antagonistic principles are fighting for supremacy inside the League: the aristocratic principle of the Great Powers, and the democratic principle of the smaller Powers. It may have been necessary to classify the members thus when the League was organized and during the first steps of its development. But so far as natural right and the League's main purpose are concerned, such a distinction between Great Powers and smaller Powers is absurd and self-contradictory. Unless the League of Nations succeeds in adopting a truly democratic constitution, its future will be continually compromised. It will be an organization to favor the strong. The military and naval strength of a country does not necessarily bear any direct relation to its service to the ends of peace, for which the League of Nations stands. Quite the contrary, the weaker Powers are likely to be the most active laborers in behalf of international peace, because their instinct of self-preservation compels them to be so. Consequently their exclusion from the Council as permanent members cannot be approved either on the grounds of justice or of efficiency. The only equitable solution would be to abolish permanent seats altogether and to give the Assembly power to elect all the Council

members.

Pertinax, writing in L'Echo de Paris, disposes of Lord Grey's objection that to make Poland a permanent member

of the Council would constitute a return to the old system of alliances, and a betrayal of the Locarno spirit, with a virtual declaration that the Locarno spirit ought to be betrayed:

The principal object of the Locarno

Agreement is to make it impossible for France to conclude any alliance, even the simplest military convention. Having accomplished this and thereby deprived us of the agencies of defense that proved our salvation in 1914, some English statesmen would like to push their advantage to the utmost. They refuse us the right of advocating the admission into the League Council of a nation whose interests accord with our own, under the pretext that it would disturb the 'régime of unanimity' under

which we should henceforth live with Germany. Unquestionably, in the bottom of their hearts they are quite aware that such unanimity will be purchased at the expense of the little States of Eastern Europe. . However this may be,

...

France cannot survive without alliances face to face with that great, secret, and powerful alliance that is called Pan-Germanism throughout Eastern and Central Europe. Sooner or later a balance of power will become imperative and will destroy the work of Locarno.

Well-informed nonpartisan British opinion is nowhere better expressed than by the London Economist in its comment upon Sir Austen Chamberlain's 'surprising and disquieting' speech at Birmingham on February

23:

'He declared that "on the occasion of the reconstruction of the Council, which the entry of Germany involved, there had arisen inevitably and unavoidably the question of what the future composition of the Council ought to be": and he tried to parry the criticism that this implied an attempt to counterbalance Germany's influence (a policy which, it is satisfactory to note in passing, he repudiated) by submitting that these other claims to permanent seats had been under discussion before the admission of Germany became practical politics. He denied that the simultaneous grant of permanent seats to other Powers besides Germany would be contrary

to the spirit of Locarno, and "claimed that if anyone was familiar with the understanding at Locarno it was himself."

"That is Sir Austen Chamberlain's case; but he was silent on one pertinent question which his defense raises, and by which it stands or falls. If, as he maintains, the conferment of permanent seats upon other Powers had been canvassed so long and so often that the whole composition of the Council was recognized, among its members, as being in the melting-pot by the time of the Locarno Conference, was this highly relevant fact in the situation frankly and fully explained to Germany? Was she warned that, while a permanent seat on the Council was assured to her, the Council itself was probably on the point of becoming a different body, with a different composition from the Council of 1920-1925?

'If this warning was given, and if Germany signed the Locarno Agreements with full knowledge of it, then Sir Austen Chamberlain's case is morally sound—though we still feel strongly that any considerable enlargement of the Council would gravely weaken it and not strengthen it, as Sir Austen asserted that it would in his speech on Tuesday. But was Germany given fair warning? The British Foreign Secretary has not yet affirmed this, and the German Government has emphatically denied it. Unless Sir Austen Chamberlain can clear this up, he rests under the imputation of having come to a secret understanding with France, either before or during the Locarno Conference, without Germany's knowledge. If that unfortunately proved true, it would be tantamount to having induced Germany to sign the Locarno Agreements under false pretenses. In that case, Sir Austen's claim that "if anyone was familiar with the understanding

of Locarno it was himself" would assume a very sinister meaning. It would mean that Locarno was not at all what the German Government and nation believed it to be, or what the British nation believed it to be. It would mean that in 1925, as in 1919, the saving spirit of reconciliation and reconstruction had had its wings clipped secretly by the statesmen of the principal Allied Powers before it had been let out of its cage and given leave to fly if it could.'

SOME FOREIGN COMTEMPORARIES

To a journal like the Living Age, which is called upon occasionally to reconcile eighty-year-old traditions with modern exigencies, the intimate little causerie in which the editors of the London Spectator notify their readers of their intention, not to change the color of their cover, but to take the far more radical step of donning for the first time any cover, strikes a responsive chord. They approach this delicate subject of apparel with the following well-weighed introduction:

'It is not easy, nor is it always desirable, to make even a slight change in a paper. People have become used to seeing a paper produced in a particular shape and a particular manner, and, as the saying is, they "know their way about it." The feeling of proprietors is similarly shy of changes, because those who own things, whatever their principles may be in politics and the other affairs of life, are notoriously conservative about their own belongings. Thus no one is more commonly opposed to change than the man who owns land, or the schoolboy or the soldier or the sailor, each of whom has grown up to regard his school, or his regiment, or his ship as in a real sense belonging to him. We too do not make a change in the

Spectator without having carefully weighed the pros and cons.'

The purpose of this innovation is not to exchange the old-time black and white for the colors of the rainbow or the sunset. The new cover will be 'of the ordinary paper, bearing the name of the Spectator and an advertisement.' Thus conservatively does one enter on the downward path. Nor is this step taken willfully and entirely of the editors' own initiative. Several complaints have reached them, 'especially from old readers whose opinions we value,' that the Spectator, after being read and handed about a good deal, 'is apt to become untidy.' But now comes another consideration. 'A great many readers have written us against interleaved advertisements' an abomination to which the Living Age has not hitherto succumbed. Until the war the Spectator kept these necessary evils discreetly hidden at the end of its 'pure reading-matter.' But circumstances have greatly changed. Instead of a profit on every copy of the Spectator, apart from advertising revenue, as there was before the war, 'the cost of producing the Spectator is now more than three times what it used to be, yet the price of the Spectator is still sixpence. In no industry, we believe, has the cost of production risen so much as in the printing trade; not only does it cost much more than formerly to print the paper, but the cost of paper itself is much higher. Under these conditions we could not possibly give our readers the variety of articles and reviews which we now publish every week... unless we were enabled to do it by our advertisement revenue. Advertisers are willing to pay a higher rate for advertisements which, as the technical phrase is, "face matter”. that is to say, which are interleaved.'

But lest advertisers take offense at so many apologetics, the editors assure

us that 'there is no reason why every advertisement should not be almost a work of art. . . . The philosophy, the uses, and the methods of advertising' interest them intensely:

"We live, it is said, in an age of advertisement. We cannot escape from it; the right thing to do is to inspire and use it and bend it to our will so that we get all its advantages without futility or vulgarity. Most people do not understand even now how much the public depends upon advertisements. Advertisements simplify life for everyone. They make buying easier because readers of advertisements have in their memories a ready-made catalogue of what there is to buy. If advertisements suddenly stopped, people would, we think, be almost staggered by the difference which the absence would make. In trade we should seem to have taken a step back into the Dark Ages.... Finally, advertisements are an enormous benefit to the public for this reason. By continually making the goods advertised better known, they increase the sales of those goods, and it thus becomes possible to produce them more cheaply. The greater the amount produced, the lower the cost of individual production. In brief, from the point of view of the readers of a paper, advertisements ought to be eagerly encouraged. They provide the wherewithal for a larger and better paper. A larger and better paper brings more readers; and the more readers there are, the more are advertisers willing to advertise. This brings in still more revenue, which in its turn makes possible further improvements in the paper. Here indeed is a beneficial circle.'

A still more venerable colleague, Le Figaro of Paris, comes to our desk with the announcement that it is 'one hundred years young.' This centenarian boast is a trifle premature. Its

first issue appeared on July 16, 1826, as a four-page weekly; and it carried in its infancy a cover design, representing the Figaro of Beaumarchais, his razor in his right hand, his left holding the nose of Bartholo emerging like a Matterhorn from a snowy expanse of lather, and bearing this legend: Raillant les sots, bravant les méchants et faisant la barbe à tout le monde. . . . Today this great daily, whose owner and political editor, Senator François Coty, is better known in America for his perfumery than for his press interests, represents the Nationalist Radicals and shows few survivals of the picaresque spirit of its youth.

At the other end of the Paris press gamut stands Le Quotidien, three years old on the twelfth of February, and already one of the widest read and oftenest quoted papers of the French capital. It contrives to be sensational in its editorial columns and fairly conservative in its news columns. Espousing the cause of the Cartel, it is none the less a cutting critic of that body's internal dissensions and remissness. Picture the conventional, hard-bitten American editor thus addressing his readers on the third birthday of his journal: 'We have tried to make our paper more sympathetic, more generous, more humane than newspapers commonly are. We have sought to make it a mouthpiece of incessant protest against life's harshness, inequalities, and indifference. We have sought through it to address a continuous appeal to mankind in behalf of mutual helpfulness, justice, and goodness.'

IMMIGRATION AND LABOR IN
FRANCE

A BRIEF dispatch in the London Daily Herald describing an attack made by two hundred unemployed French laborers on ninety Polish laborers engaged

in repairing a railway line near Paris, in which several Poles were critically injured, calls attention to what may prove an embarrassing condition should a wave of unemployment like that from which Great Britain and Germany are suffering sweep across the neighboring republic. According to the Paris correspondent of L'Indépendance Belge, there are more than two million alien laborers in France. In order to cope with this flood, the French are trying to make naturalization easy for the newcomers. Three years' residence suffices to win citizenship, but even twelve months is enough for a man who shows exceptional ability. A Frenchwoman retains her nationality on marriage to a foreigner. This may lead to a rapid assimilation of the Poles, who are mostly single men and are living in a country not contiguous to their own. But the Italians, who migrate to France in families and who settle close to the frontier of their native land, in districts which their countrymen regard as historically belonging to Italy, present a different problem. It is not yet three score years and ten since Nice and Savoy were Italian and historical accidents and plebiscites have alluring possibilities.

The Paris correspondent of the London Times tells us that this foreign invasion is 'getting on the nerves of the French.' The nation is unsettled by a feeling 'that people of other races are quietly laying hold of bits of their country, and penetrating their national existence, without their being able to prevent it. France cannot afford to follow the example of the United States and close her doors to aliens. She needs them too badly.' But even this need does not make them welcome.

Of the newcomers, the Italians, who number over eight hundred thousand, are the most numerous. Next in order