Dame, Urchin & Jam

Since the Stresa Conference decided that Germany has been naughty but is not to be spanked (see p. 19), new French Premier Flandin was in a quandary when the League Council met this week. France could scarcely get back to birch-talk after Stresa, but she could and did lay on the Council table a stinging memorandum back-dated "Paris, April 9." She had hoped Britain would be willing, as Italy was, to send this stinger to the League with the full weight of Stresa's Big Three. Instead, France, with only the moral support of expressed British and Italian indignation, had to attempt the swishing alone.

Opening with lengthy, minute particulars of Germany's urchin-in-the-jam-closet behavior, Dame France recalled to the League Council that, whereas German Air Minister Goring denied on Dec. 20, 1934 that his country possessed a military air force, three months later Realmleader Hitler told Sir John Simon that the Fatherland's military air force is equal to Great Britain's.

Hitler's exit from the jam closet, sticky-faced, the Dame called "the culmination of long and methodical labors pursued in secret. ... It is the [League] Council's duty ... to state the conclusions that must be drawn, for purposes of their treaty policy, by governments.

"If a country runs no risk by releasing itself from its obligations, and if a treaty-breaking State is to be encouraged by impunity," concluded France, "that is equivalent to abolishing the whole idea of contract and obligation. . . . There would soon be no room for any policy but one, force." Within 24 hours Germany had put enough pressure on the all but defenseless Scandinavian countries to transform their Foreign Ministers at Geneva into ardent lobbyists against any Council action which might impute even blame to Germany. Meanwhile Swiss defectives claimed to have unmasked a plot to assassinate the Foreign Ministers of France, Czechoslovakia and Rumania who are known to have busied themselves in recent weeks over the draft text of a virtual military alliance with Russia to keep Germany in check. Since assassination was the fate of French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou, who first pressed the idea of this "sanitary alliance," the Swiss warning caused Geneva statesmen to surround themselves this week as never before with bodyguards.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.