Caligraphy

In one of the dazzling rooms of the French Foreign Office, a score of distinguished statesmen sat around a highly polished table. In the background were the underlings, porfolios under arms, pince-nez perched on noses, sleek hair plastered flat on knowing heads, well-pressed clothes hanging immaculately from shoulders and hips.

There was a tomblike silence in the room. Premier Theunis of Belgium poised his pen above a paper which lay before him. His right hand descended swiftly, there was a dexterous movement, a horrid, scratchy sound, a faint bump and a signature had been penned. A score of suspended breaths were released and the paper passed on to the representatives of France, Italy, Japan, with the same ceremony. Then the paper was passed along to U. S. Ambassador Frank B. Kellogg, Secretary of State-designate, at present accredited to the Court of St. James's in London. Mr. Kellogg looked down at the paper, took pen in hand, looked up and said he supposed the conference realized that he was about to sign, subject to the reservation that his signature bound the U. S. Government "only insofar as the rights of the U. S. were concerned."

At this, a solitary tuft of hair was seen to rise vertically from the otherwise bald pate of Winston Churchill, British Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was amazed at Mr. Kellogg's statement. It had been understood, he said, that the U. S. delegation would sign the agreement (concerning division of the proceeds of the Experts' Plan) before them, and would thereby become active partners in the Experts' Plan. Premier Theunis of Belgium and Finance Ministers Clementel of France and De Stefani of Italy backed the views of Mr. Churchill. "How could the U. S. expect to collect from Germany and at the same time refuse to accept any responsibility?"

Ambassador Kellogg looked nonplussed and, apparently fearing last-minute complications, drove his pen over the paper in front of him. U. S. Ambassador to France, Myron T. Herrick and Colonel James A. Logan, hitherto U. S. unofficial observer with the Reparations Commission, signed under Mr. Kellogg's name in the space reserved for the U. S. Representatives of Brazil, Greece, Portugal, Rumania, Yugo-Slavia and Czechoslovakia similarly exhibited specimens of their caligraphy. The agreement relating to the division of the proceeds of the Experts' Plan (TIME, Jan. 19) was in effect, each of the signatories having been vested with plenipotentiary powers.

From many places on the Continent of Europe, wild shouts were heard. The U. S. had abandoned its policy of isolation, had come back to Europe once more! Everywhere old hatreds and bitternesses were forgotten. Everywhere the U. S. was extolled. All the leading statesmen paid tribute to the U. S. attitude. All said that U. S. co-operation had been bought at a cheap price.

Editor J. L. Garvin, writing in The Sunday Observer, London newspaper, said:

America in consenting to receive a share of the Dawes annuities assumed direct and inevitable responsibility for the working of the scheme. Nothing is changed in nominal principle. In fact and substance America again becomes the associate of the Allies, but in a way which makes' her almost an equal associate of Germany if that country keeps the character of a genuinely friendly and sensible nation.

The establishment of this remarkable position cannot have been other than a deliberate act of American statesmanship, and we believe this development will prove to be of immense and salutary significance for the future of Europe.

During the Paris proceedings Mr. Kellogg, the principal American delegate, was not only Ambassador in London but designated Secretary of State. Without his qualities of genial shrewdness and reasonable tenacity, the Paris conference, like the London conference last Summer, could not have reached the complete success it achieved.

Across the turbulent Atlantic the U. S. Senate's roar, irreconcilable and frantic, was heard (see Page 4).