Two Snooks

Those who don't want to fight can only talk, and they can always be talked back to. During World War I Great Britain's high-handed treatment of U. S. shipping brought the U. S. and Great Britain perilously close to a breach of relations. Last week, although nothing so serious was in sight, Great Britain cocked two more snooks across the Atlantic.

On Oct. 3 the Inter-American Neutrality Conference at Panama undertook to establish a "neutrality belt" extending an average of 300 miles from the North and South American coasts. On Dec. 23 Panama's President Augusto Samuel Boyd protested against violation of that zone in the battle between the Admiral Graf Spee and three British cruisers (TIME, Dec. 25). In last week's reply to both the original declaration and the protest, Great Britain flatly refused to admit that a neutrality belt existed.

If Great Britain surrendered the right to attack belligerent ships outside the three-mile limit, said the note, German warships and supply vessels might be provided with "a vast sanctuary from which they could emerge to attack Allied and neutral shipping." Said Great Britain: if the Americas wanted to establish such a peace belt they should be prepared to keep it peaceful by policing it.

The British reply was made as the Inter-American Neutrality Committee met in Rio de Janeiro. Opening the first session of the meeting, President Getulio Vargas of Brazil declaimed that the Americas had as much right to establish a peace zone as European nations had to proclaim a war zone. This fine thought was not followed by any practical suggestions. In Buenos Aires, Argentina's Foreign Minister Jose Maria Cantilo suggested that if Great Britain and France would agree to send no more warships into the safety zone, it might be possible to get Germany to promise the same thing. Nobody else was so hopeful. It seemed that the Americas' neutrality belt was likely to continue as theory.

The other argument concerned only the U. S. and Great Britain. Last month the U. S. Department of State sent Great Britain a "vigorous protest" against interference with mail carried from the U. S. on American or neutral ships. Last week Great Britain politely refused to yield. As long as the U. S. does not object to classifying money, securities or jewels as contraband, the British intimated that they would continue to examine mails bound for Germany to see if they contained anything valuable. The British did not mention that somehow the mail was censored while officers were looking through it for dollars and diamonds.

To make sure the point stuck, next day British authorities in Bermuda dragged sacks of mail from a transatlantic Clipper, began putting it through a thoroughgoing examination. When the Clipper took off for the Azores 24 hours later, more than a ton of mail was still in the hands of the censors. All Secretary of State Cordell Hull could think of to do about this was to hint that the Clippers might stop calling at Bermuda, fly directly from the U. S. to the Azores, as they did before war broke.

Early this week the U. S. State Department made public an aide-memoire to British Ambassador Lord Lothian on detention of U. S. ships in the Mediterranean. The U. S. point: Italian ships are detained an average of only four days at Gibraltar, U. S. ships an average of 12.4 days. The State Department's demand: "This government must expect that the British Government will at least take suitable and prompt measures to bring about an immediate correction of this situation."

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