White Paper

As a gentle overture to January's five power naval conference, the British Foreign Office issued a "White Paper" last week.* Bearing the signature of Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Arthur Henderson, it was strongly reminiscent of the quixotic reasoning of James Ramsay MacDonald in his more elfin moments. Discussing that bugaboo of Anglo-U. S. naval agreement, the question of Freedom of the Seas and rights of neutrals in wartime, the paper read:

"The whole situation has been built up on the assumption that there is nothing illegitimate in the use of war as an instrument of national policy, and as a necessary corollary that position and the rights of neutrals are entirely independent of the circumstances of any war which may be in progress.

"This assumption is no longer valid as regards states which are members of the League of Nations and parties to the Kellogg Pact. . . . In other words, as between members of the League there can be no neutral rights, because there can be no neutrals."

This reasoning brought a loud rumble of protest from the square jaw of Hon. William Edgar Borah, Chairman of the U. S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"If the British interpretation of the Kellogg Pact means that henceforth there shall be no neutrals," he boomed portentously, "it necessarily follows that we and all the other signatories become belligerents. Under these circumstances the pact is misnamed. It is not a peace pact. It is a war pact."

"The British conception of the matter," said Chairman Fred Albert Britten of the U. S. House Naval Affairs Committee, "is silly."

*A "White Paper" is any brief government report to the British Parliament printed in a small unbound pamphlet (50 to 100 words), not unlike a U. S. congressional committee report. A similar but more pretentious document is the "Blue Paper," bound in blue covers.

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