INTERNATIONAL: Snowden’s Slice

So tired that they had mostly ceased to curse, 400 disgusted correspondents from 30 countries waited morosely, one chill midnight last week, in the dank stone courtyard of the Palace of the Counts of Holland. They had had only sandwiches for dinner. So had Chancellor of the British Exchequer Philip Snowden and the other august delegates to The Hague Conference who were squabbling in the old Dutch Senate Building, the medieval Binnenhof. About 10 p. m. the shivering correspondents in the courtyard had tried to make a bonfire of newspapers. Scandalized Dutch firemen had rushed to put out the cheerful blaze, then tidily swept up the mess. After that it was just dogged waiting.

Through a lighted window shaggy old Prime Minister Aristide Briand of France could be seen in his celebrated fighting attitude, slumped and seemingly dozing in a great arm chair, while the onus of battle was borne by his dynamic lieutenant, Louis Loucheur, famed walrus-moustached industrialist and “Richest Man in France.” Came a rumor that Germany’s bald, flabby-fleshed Foreign Minister Dr. Gustav Stresemann had suddenly collapsed in the midst of an impassioned speech, smitten by his old kidney trouble. The rumor was corrected; Dr. Stresemann had merely gone very pale and turned over the task of talking for the Reich to Germany’s Minister for Occupied Regions, Dr. Josef K. Wirth, stodgy onetime German Chancellor.

Tense with expectation, the correspondents in the courtyard began to sense that the bitter, three-week fight of crippled Chancellor Snowden to get for Britain a larger slice of the German Reparations “spongecake” (TIME, Aug. 19 et seq.) was all but won. From midnight on the Continental powers steadily though stubbornly yielded. Soon after the ancient Binnenhof clock clanged one it was known that Mr. Snowden had received and accepted an offer satisfying 82% of his demands. After a month of false rumors of agreement correspondents would believe the welcome truth only if uttered by drawn-faced, cripple Snowden himself. As he passed through the gates of the Binnenhof at two a. m., hobbling wearily on two rubber-tipped canes, they surged about him shouting, “Is everything all right?”

“Yes, I believe so,” answered the little Chancellor in a voice curiously meek and soft, “I do believe so!” and twitching himself painfully into his limousine he rode away, whistling pensively. Later, when the whole British press had begun to roar unanimous approval, the little lame Yorkshireman said: “If England is pleased, so am I. I set myself a task and it was not an easy one. Without the help of my wife I could never have achieved it.”

A deft nurse, an adoring confidante, a —staunch political helpmate is Mrs. Philip Snowden. From the first she told correspondents at The Hague that her husband would get his way. When they doubted she said simply, “I guess you just don’t know how strong and stubborn a Yorkshireman can be.”

Hague Settlement. Two days more were needed to whip the Midnight agreement into formal shape. A third day saw it signed by all the delegations at a final plenary session, after which the Conference contentedly adjourned. Basically the settlement thus reached is twofold financial and political.

The Fiscal Side provides that the Young Plan shall supersede the Dawes Plan on Nov. 1, 1929. The Dawes Plan fixed only the maximum amount which Germany might be called upon to pay in any one year, but left unspecified the number of years over which the Allies could collect. That is to say, the Dawes Plan did not fix the total Reparations debt of Germany. The Young Plan was drafted last Spring in Paris (TIME, Feb. 18, et seq.): 1) to fix the total German Reparations debt at a present cash value of some nine billion dollars, payable over 58 years; 2) to provide for the selling of bonds on the world market secured by Germany’s promise to pay these Reparations, the proceeds from selling the bonds to go at once as a cash payment to Creditor Powers. Adoption of the Young Plan at The Hague last week-subject of course to ratification by the Parliaments of the Powers concerned-means that Germans now know for the first time how much it cost them to lose the War, and that U. S. citizens will soon have the privilege of buying prodigious blocks of German Reparations bonds.

The Political Side of the settlement pledges France, Britain and Belgium to withdraw the last of their troops from the occupied German Rhineland not later than June 30, 1930. This is the major concession for which Foreign Minister Dr. Gustav Stresemann has been battling for six years. Had he gone home to Berlin last week without it, the Cabinet of Chancellor Hermann Müller (a sloppily-dressed, insignificant Socialist utterly dwarfed by Dr. Stresemann) would certainly have fallen. Today beaming, sentimental Germans know for the first time since the War the exact date on which they will be again sole masters of their beloved, storied Rhine.

Sponge Cake Victory. Neither of these two great international achievements-ratification of the Young Plan and provision for evacuating the Rhineland-had very much to do with the essentially national and British victory which Mr. Snowden scored in getting his bigger slice of sponge cake. Immensely popular in Britain, the “sponge cake victory” assumed world importance only because the stubborn Yorkshireman was able to block the conference from achieving its great ends until he got what he wanted.

What Chancellor Snowden demanded before he would accept the Young Plan was an increase in the share of Reparations which the Plan allotted to Great Britain. The increase asked by Mr. Snowden was only $11,520,000 per annum, or less than — 25% of the total at which Britain balanced her budget last year (TIME, Aug. 26). France, Belgium, Italy and Japan insisted through the first weeks of Hague haggling that Chancellor Snowden must accept the share allotted Great Britain in the Young Plan as originally drawn, because the British experts on the Young Committee had fully endorsed this arrangement with the consent of the then Conservative British Cabinet headed by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. From the first, Chancellor Snowden, representing the newly elected British Labor Cabinet of Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald, stubbornly contended that he was not bound in any way by the endorsement of the British experts who helped draw up the Young Plan. In effect he charged that the experts had betrayed Britannia by altering the so-called Spa percentages fixed in 1923 and embodied in the Dawes Plan.

Last week, having haggled the Conference to a standstill, Chancellor Snowden was able to force his foes to yield Great Britain an extra $9,520,000 per year, or 82% of his demand. This extra annuity will be raised partly from the interest on capital sums of German Reparations set aside and guaranteed by France, Belgium, Italy and Japan, and partly by an arrangement whereby Germany agrees to forego certain sums due her from the “overlapping” of the Dawes and Young Plans as the latter supersedes the former.

From Italy shrewd Chancellor Snowden won a concession little noted by correspondents but of immense “talking value” to the British Labor Party. For the next three years the Italian State Railways, which must buy one million tons of coal a year from somewhere, agree to buy it from Great Britain. Not settled was the question of where to set up the general clearing house of the Young Plan called “The International Bank of Settlements” (TIME, June 10). This detail, an important one, was turned over to a continuing subcommittee, thus making it necessary for the conference to convene again, probably next month and probably not at The Hague.

Shoulder High. “Chair him! Chair him!” roared lusty British voices as the channel steamer which brought Chancellor Snowden home docked at Harwich. The fragile, crippled Yorkshireman was pounced upon and “chaired”—carried shoulder-high—to his boat train. Mrs. Snowden watched anxiously.

At London’s dingy Liverpool Street Station an official who rushed forward with a wheel chair for the Chancellor was roughly thrust aside. “Good old Phil! we’ll carry you home!” roared the crowd, but Mrs. Snowden successfully pleaded that her husband should be “chaired” only to his waiting motor.

Flushed with praise and the knowledge that he had just been appointed Acting Prime Minister in the absence of James Ramsay MacDonald at Geneva (see The League), forthright Chancellor Snowden voiced his pride frankly to correspondents: “We succeeded in all the essential points of our claims. . . . The influence of Great Britain in international affairs has been reestablished. . . . The arrangement for withdrawal of foreign troops from the Rhine is the greatest political achievement since Locarno!”