Eggs & Loans

Britons scarcely noted the first rumblings of an acrimonious debate in the U.S. Congress over the British loan. They were more worried about dried eggs. Long the butt of G.I. wisecracks, the yellow powder is no joke to Britons, and when the Food Ministry announced that the monthly ration of one package (equivalent to twelve eggs) would have to end, there was a housewifely clamor.

London papers did not mention the fact, but dried eggs and the British loan are closely related. Britons need the $3.75 billion U.S. credit in order to buy food, raw materials and machinery during the next five years of reconstruction. But neither their leaders nor the man on the Clapham omnibus, however much their nation needed the dollars, liked the terms on which it got them.. Those at the top did not want to face an uncertain free-trade future. Arch-Imperialist Robert Boothby had orated in the Commons debate: ". . . One mandate which His Majesty's Government never got from the people . . . was to sell the British Empire for a packet of [American] cigarets." The man in the street cared less for Empire than for a prideful feeling that Britain can better stand alone.

U.S. legislators had some squawks of their own. House Banking and Currency Chairman Brent Spence wanted to know:

1) "whether England needs this whole credit" (most economists thought the $3.75 billion too little, not too much);

2) "whether England can't get some help from others" (Britain would scarcely fail to try, but significant help could come only from the U.S.).

Montana's Britain-baiting Burton K. Wheeler, used to declaiming that private U.S. investments in foreign powers would embroil the U.S. in war, now suggested that the British raise the money by selling securities to private investors. Few U.S. investment experts thought such an enormous loan could be privately floated.

Some sanctified geese on Capitol Hill hissed that the British credit would surely be followed by requests from Russia, France, China and a host of others. Administration leaders insisted that the British loan was "unique."

The rumpus over the British credit made the State Department discourage other large-scale borrowers. Paris papers predicted that France's special "good will" emissary, Leon Blum, expected in the U.S. in mid-February, would ask for $2.5 billion. His pleas might fall on near-deaf ears, even if he should argue that only U.S. aid to France would check the westward tide of Communism. Other prospective borrowers were biding their time, waiting to see what Congress would do with the British loan.

All realized that in the past six months the U.S. program of postwar aid to its allies had lost ground. But the informed consensus was not yet ready to agree with the gloomy hunch of Britain's Board of Trade President Sir Stafford Cripps. Last week at Birmingham he said: "It looks as though Congress might turn down the loan."

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