"If they had our chance. . . ."

"If they had our chance. . . ."

It is always plain that Europe and the United States are lacking in mutual understanding. . . . They appear to think that we are going to do exactly what they would do if they had our chance. . . . It is befitting that we should pursue our course . . . in accordance with the requirements of conscience and righteousness.

--CALVIN COOLIDGE Armistice Day Speech

Since most Englishmen honestly believe that collectively they are the true font of Conscience and Righteousness, the words spoken by President Calvin Coolidge, last fortnight, stirred a deep tidal wave of English indignation, which was still rising last week. Seldom before have so many hundreds and then thousands of letters poured in upon the Times--famed Safety Valve of Empire Passions. Finally with the appearance of England's characteristic "weekly reviews," the weighty and considered indignation of British best minds was hurled against Calvin Coolidge.

The New Statesman devoted to "the obsolescent President" a full page editorial headed Pecksniffian Guff, and savagely said: "After years of sonorous silence, only punctuated now and then by the utterance of some discreet inanity, he suddenly delivered a sort of dying kick with a viciousness of which few people on this side of the Atlantic would have supposed him capable. His Armistice Day speech was in effect a denunciation of Europe and all its works from the standpoint of a 100% New England backwoodsman."

The Saturday Review thought that "There is no probability that Mr. Hoover will be even as tolerant of European weaknesses as is the present occupant of the White House," and agreed with the Nation that President-Elect Herbert Hoover must have seen and approved an advance draft of the President's speech.

Even the Spectator lost its temper, and the Times required a full week to recover its equanimity. An early Times editorial declared that President Roosevelt once said, "We needed Panama and we took it," and argued that the meaning of President Coolidge's speech is: "When America needs territory she takes it, and when she wants warships she builds them."

Later the Times cooled down to the following well-bred remarks, the sleek irony of which will be lost on stupid people: "It is not easy for a European touching American shores to discern the pressure of a financial burden estimated by the President to exceed that of any other nation and to comprise 'half the entire wealth of the country at the time it entered the conflict.

"Still less does the visitor to that tranquil but busy continent suspect such imminent dangers threatening its long coast line and its growing overseas commerce as to demand a 'larger number of warships than any other nation. For such, in effect, is President Coolidge's claim."

Upon these points the President said:

It is probable that our final cost [incurred due to the War] will run well toward $100,000,000,000, or half the entire wealth of the country when we entered the conflict. . . . We should like to have our Government debts all settled, although it is probable that we could better afford to lose them than our debtors could afford not to pay them. . . .

Turning to the matter of Sea Power, the President recalled that Britain possesses, apart from her navy, certain "advantages" not possessed by the U. S., namely a large merchant fleet capable of being armed. He concluded: We are entitled to a larger number of warships than a nation having these advantages.

Briefly, the old and often successful British method of repeating in a tone of horror, what someone else has frankly said, 'was applied, last week, to President Coolidge, very much as it was once applied to Wilhelm II. Only British Labor's Daily Herald went the whole hog and bluntly said:

"German statesmen similarly declared that their naval programs, before the War, were based on needs and were not competitive with our navy. . . . All the elements of an Anglo-American conflict are now present."

To Washington correspondents the President observed, last week, that he would willingly consider any proposals for the limitation of armaments which might emanate from the British Government. Proposals of this nature were made in the House of Lords, last week, by Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, winner of the Wood-row Wilson Peace Prize, who was forced to resign as British representative on the League of Nations because his advocacy of pacifism and disarmament was in advance of the British Government's position. That position was such that absolutely nothing was achieved when the Naval Limitations Parley (TIME, June 27 to Aug. 15, 1927) was convoked in Geneva.

Patriotic U. S. citizens rejoiced that the President had so well summed the entire situation in five words of one syllable each: "If they had our chance. . . ."