Unvarnished Schacht

Courage to tell the foremost financiers of the Great Powers that they resemble a gang of shady horse-traders is possessed by Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, the famed "Iron Man" who is President of Germany's Reichsbank. Today he represents the Fatherland on the Second Dawes Committee in Paris (TIME, Jan. 14 et seq.) which is trying to revise the Dawes Plan and decide how much Germany must eventually pay in reparations. Last week the "Iron Man" found himself deadlocked with the delegates of the Great Powers, who include John Pierpont Morgan. Result: Dr. Schacht, who fears not even Wall Street, expressed himself to correspondents with concentrated, guttural vehemence, thus:

"I hold that it is the best policy to speak the unvarnished truth. I have found a pleasant atmosphere in the discussions so far. Nevertheless, I have had difficulty. Often I am reproached at the conference that I take everything too seriously and that I see everything too gloomily--but then, all Germans do.

"If we try to be in a good humor people say 'Look at this display of good humor --they must be very well off.' If we are serious and thoughtful, then people say it is all hypocrisy. They want to make us believe that everything is bad with them. "The Dawes Plan was a great idea-- an act. The Dawes conversion of a political question into an economic question was a masterpiece. It was the outcome of a new and better outlook on life. Therein lay its creative merit. But now--much has changed. "There is danger that the whole business may become a shady horse-trading deal and it may take a long time to sell the horse, if it is sold at all." Obviously nothing was accomplished, last week, in an atmosphere so surcharged, and soon the famed yacht Corsair was off on a little cruise in Venetian waters with her owner, Mr. Morgan.