Germany Accepts

From the German Foreign Office stepped Dr. Gustav Stresemann, jaunty and smartly attired despite his rotundity. Passing down the famed Wilhelmstrasse (William Street) he crossed the Wilhelmplatz (William Square), entered the tall gloomy portal of the U. S. Embassy, and strode briskly up its cheerful, white stone stair. Soon Dr. Stresemann was handing a crisp, official envelope to U. S. Ambassador Jacob Gould Schurman, onetime President of Cornell University.

The envelope contained the first reply by any Power to the proposal for a multilateral pact "renouncing war" which U. S. Secretary of State Frank Billings Kellogg has transmitted to Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan (TIME, April 23), in the form of a tentative treaty text. The note presented by Dr. Stresemann to Mr. Schurman declared unequivocally: ". . . The German Government ... is ready to conclude a pact in accordance with the proposal of the Government of the United States. . . ."

This meant that disarmed Germany will sign without reservations a peace pact which militant France has intimated that she cannot sign because it might conflict with her commitments to the League and her allies--commitments which may obligate her to go to war (TIME, April 30). How different is the position of Germany--which has no military alliances--was cleverly emphasized last week, in Dr. Stresemann's note: "The German Government is convinced that . . . the obligations arising from the Covenant of the League of Nations and the [Locarno] Rhine Pact . . . contain nothing which could in any way conflict with the obligations provided for in the draft treaty of the United States."

So harmoniously does this declaration chime with the views of Secretary Kellogg that last week British editors began to warn British Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain not to let himself be outsmarted by Dr. Stresemann in securing the goodwill of the U. S. Sir Austen, obviously embarrassed, soon made an unfortunate public allusion at Birmingham to the "unwisdom of sacrificing old friends to gain new ones." Thereupon he was heavily taken to task by the Olympian London Times, which usually supports him but declared last week: "The French position is specifically and narrowly French. . . . British opinion in this country and the Dominions is very strongly in favor of ... the American proposal. ... It would be an advantage if that [fact] could be stated . . . formally and emphatically ... by the Foreign Secretary."

Since the elements of a first class Franco-British tiff were thus brewing, the foreign offices of these two "old friend" countries hastily devised a formula which would save faces all round. They proposed, unofficially, to the U. S. State Department that an international conference of jurists be called to draft the final Peace Pact text. To this proposal Secretary Kellogg returned an unofficial but emphatic "No!" Thus he shrewdly sought to force the Allied Powers to declare before public opinion whether or not they are ready to "renounce war."

In Berlin, it was predicted that Secretary Kellogg will get the Nobel Peace Prize for 1928.