$300 for Junk

White men have confidence that they can bluff a Chinaman. Perhaps that fact explains why Premier Count Stephen Bethlen of Hungary proceeded, last week, to bluff the League of Nations. He knew that the Acting President of the League Council is now, by alphabetical rotation, His Excellency Tcheng Loh, the Chinese Minister at Paris.

With this tall, gangling Celestial at the 'helm of the League, Count Bethlen dared, last week, to order destroyed the evidence in a case upon which the Council was expected to sit in judgment when it convenes in March. The case was that involving five carloads of machine gun parts, smuggled last December from Italy across Austria and into Hungary, where they arrived on New Year's Day. This smugglery (a flagrant violation of the Treaty of Trianon under which Hungary is disarmed) has caused Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia and Rumania, to demand a League investigation. Therefore, last week, Continental statesmen were electrified when it was announced, at Budapest, that the machine gun parts had been ordered broken up and would be sold as junk. Never did a suspected criminal more brazenly proceed to destroy "Exhibit A" before the very eyes of a judge not yet quite ready to hear his case.

Came the news from Budapest to Paris. Unhappy Acting League Council Chairman Tcheng Loh found himself a helpless victim of the alphabet. He was the wrong man in the wrong place. He speaks for a nation where wholesale smugglery of arms has produced incessant civil war. The very "Chinese Republic" from which he stands accredited at Paris has vanished in a welter of Chinese anarchy. Therefore his position in respect to a mere five carloads of smuggled machine gun parts was exquisitely awkward. No wonder then that Tcheng Loh betook his gangling, spidery self, last week, to the office of paunchy, sleepy-eyed French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, his friend and frequent counselor.

Together they drafted a telegram as timid as the position of Tcheng Loh is delicate. Transmitted through the League Secretariat, this message reached Prime Minister Count Bethlen of Hungary in the following form: ". . . The Council of the League, having before it a request from the Czechoslovak, Jugoslav and Rumanian Governments and having learned from the press that the Hungarian Government is going to sell the objects to which the request refers, thinks it would be prudent to delay this project, the matter involved coming before the Council in a few days."

Within a few hours came the curt, scornful reply of Premier Count Bethlen, a martinet, a virtual dictator: "The Hungarian Government tonight received with surprise your telegram. . . . The public auction sale [of the demolished parts] is scheduled for tomorrow. . . . It is impossible to postpone the auction. . . .

"I may remark that the regulations for investigation rights inherent in the League of Nations do not apply in the present case. However, the Hungarian Government as a courtesy to the Council's President, will ask the purchaser of the goods to leave them untouched where they now lie."

To this covert insult another was speedily added when a Budapest junk dealer was permitted to bid in for 1,800 pengoes ($300) a quantity of scrap parts which could not be positively identified as identical with or different from those discovered on New Year's Day at the Austro-Hungarian frontier by an Austrian customs official but since then exclusively in the hands of Hungarians.

Though His Excellency Tcheng Loh took no further action, last week, other statesmen were busy with speculation as to what will happen when the League Council meets. Of the Great Powers only France is really anxious to force a show down with Hungary in the interest of her small national allies, Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia and Rumania. Italy must presumably oppose any action, lest she herself be proved to have shipped arms to Hungary in violation of the Treaty of Trianon. Germany is expected to take the same stand, though for the different reason that she fears the establishment of a precedent which would confirm the League's right to investigate German supplies of arms as well as Hungarian. Thus it seemed, last week, that Count Stephen Bethlen might eventually succeed in bluffing not merely one Chinaman but the League Council as a whole.

Other League activities, last week, included the meeting of the Security Commission at Geneva, under the Chairman ship of Foreign Minister Dr. Eduard Benes of Czechoslovakia who was unfortunately stricken with a severe cold and obliged to take to bed. The Commission labored all week to produce tentative bilateral and multilateral treaties covering both security and arbitration for possible future signature among League states.