Two Blanks

When he departed last week for Lima, Peru, to promote "continental solidarity" at the eighth Pan-American Conference, Secretary of State Cordell Hull left behind him two large blank spaces in U. S. foreign relations such as the country has not seen in many a year. Over one blank stood the name of Germany. In one of the shortest diplomatic calls on record--two minutes--German Ambassador Hans Dieckhoff said good-by to Mr. Hull before taking himself back to Germany for a stay as "indefinite" as U. S. Ambassador Wilson's (see col. 1). In addition, Secretary Hull published the texts of an exchange of notes with Germany, begun in October and finished last week, by which he sought unsuccessfully to get Germany to make good on some $20,000,000 of Austrian bonds held by the U. S. and its nationals. Germany's reply: 1) that it felt no legal responsibility for these bonds since they were issued "to support the incompetent Austrian State artificially created by the Paris treaties"; and 2) that German trade with the U. S. was in too passive a state anyway to make payments on the bonds feasible, left the matter precisely where Mr. Hull found it: nowhere. With the two Ambassadors recalled, German-American relations existed at week's end only technically.

Equally blank, though the Ambassadors were still at their posts,* stood U. S. relations with Japan. To his press conference Mr. Hull declared that a reply received from Japan, in response to his sharp note of October 6 warning that U. S. trade and other rights in China must be preserved, was "not responsive." Japan had talked vastly and vaguely about a "new situation" in China. As in the case of Germany, there was absolutely nothing the State Department could do except perhaps send another, sharper note, and get back another, vaguer reply. Simple fact of the matter was that for the first time since the clipper-ship era of which Franklin Roosevelt is so fond, the first time since Commodore Perry opened Japan to U. S. trade in 1854, and since Roosevelt I made growing Japan a U. S. protege in its first struggle for expansion against Russia (1904-05), the U. S. was totally impotent in Japan and China. Unless Congress sent the Navy to enforce U. S. trade rights--which action U. S. business interests in China would deplore as strongly as U. S. home sentiment would restrain it--there was nothing further Secretary Hull could do or say. Without hindrance from any other Power, Japan by last week had taken unto itself 430,000 square miles of new territory, well sprinkled with blood. For 17 months it had bored like a host of deliberate, conscienceless termites into the vast stolid flank of Asia, strewing plains and rivervalleys with dead and wounded, and when Japan chose to tell the U. S. that there is a "new situation'' in Asia, all the U. S. Secretary of State could possibly say was that this reply was "not responsive."

New Ambassador Kensuke Horinouchi, addressing the America-Japan Society in Tokyo last week, capped the "new situation" by purring: "It is incredible that any problem between our two countries, however difficult it may be, shall be incapable of a solution through diplomatic negotiations. . . . Japan and America are destined to come closer and closer together and work in concert toward the attainment of peace and prosperity not only in the Pacific but throughout the world."

*Still in Washington last week was Ambassador Hirosi Saito, yet to leave Tokyo his appointed successor, Kensuke Horinouchi.

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