Young Memorandum

Pleasantly but insistently last week Chairman Owen D. Young of the second Dawes Committee at Paris (TIME, Jan. 14 et seq.) circulated a memorandum of his own drafting among the delegates of the Great Powers who have met to decide how much Germany must finally pay in reparations.

Hitherto it had proved impossible to gain general acceptance of any definite figure in respect to any of the huge sums involved. But the Young Memorandum, secret, was understood to lay down as fixed beyond all need of further dickering this principle: Germany will pay the Allies not less than the total they owe the United States in War debts--namely $8,800,000,000.

Even the German delegation was declared to have tacitly endorsed this principle, last week, as a result of repeated personal conferences between Manhattan's sociable yet determined Owen D. Young and Berlin's somewhat brusque and offish Dr. Hjalmar Schacht--he who only last fortnight embroiled the committee by suggesting that its august proceedings amounted to "shady horse-trading."

If Chairman Young did thus actually obtain the agreement of Dr. Schacht to the minimum figure of $8,800,000,000, he performed a major feat. So sanguine seemed the delegates of results to follow that they determined to meet hereafter on Sundays as well as week days in an effort to fix as soon as possible how much more than minimum the Fatherland must pay. This surplus above the Allied needs for repayment to the U. S. is supposed to partially cover the cost of repairing War damage done by German forces by land, sea, and air. Reputedly, the Young Memorandum contains a tentative statement of what might be considered the just "reconstruction claims" of each of the Allied Powers. If cables spoke true, last week, acceptance of these recommendations by the chairman would mean cutting almost in half what Great Britain, France and Belgium had previously fixed as their minimum demands.