INTERNATIONAL: Blank, Blank, Blank

What its delegates thought of the treaties and agreements they have made, the Seventh Pan-American Conference showed last week by breaking up at Montevideo in a manner remindful of harridans struggling over cut-rate stockings in a bargain basement.

Most delegates dashed out of the final plenary session intent only on signing everything that needed signing and still catching the night boat for gay and glamorous Buenos Aires. On long tables Conference secretaries had placed what seemed to be treaties and agreements, each open at the last page for signatures. Jostling and squabbling the statesmen scrambled to squiggle. Delegates of several countries who had told the Conference they would not sign the Treaty on Women’s Equal Civil & Political Rights rushed up to it with pens poised and were only stopped from signing by pickets hostile to the Treaty who kept loudly calling it by name. In the squash and rush, dozens of delegates signed in apparent ignorance of a remarkable discovery by Cuban Chief Delegate Angel Alberto Giraudy: all but one of the documents presented for signing were in effect blanks! Not having had time to prepare complete documents, the Conference Secretariat had covered with words only the last page of most documents, leaving nearly all the front pages white and empty. “Scandalous!”‘ cried Cuba’s sharp-eyed Giraudy who had been the first to slip out of the Conference into the treaty room. “We are being asked to sign we know not what!” Second Chief Delegate to slip out of the Conference was U. S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull. His speech hailing “the Spirit of Montevideo” had just been cheered for five minutes. President Roosevelt had just cabled “You have shown our neighbors that your ideals and mine are not empty words.”

In this spirit the Secretary of State took pen and signed the only document which was complete, a pledge under which the signatories promise to sign later, after appropriate investigation, such of five peace pacts sponsored by Argentina as they have not signed already (TIME, Dec. 25). It was the sole binding act performed by the U. S. Delegation at the Conference. Left unsigned by the U. S. was the Treaty on Equal Nationality Rights for Women.

The quirk of blank treaties gave Mr. Hull a graceful out. As he raced to catch his boat to Buenos Aires, he announced that able U. S. Minister to Uruguay J. Butler Wright, a member of the U. S. Delegation, will thoroughly examine Conference treaties as they are completed, signing those which seem to be in order, sending them to the State Department.

Meanwhile Secretary and Mrs. Hull were all but lost in Buenos Aires so far as correspondents were concerned, when Argentine rebels shot up several rural areas and President Justo, after placing the entire nation under a “state of siege” clapped on all news the tightest censorship in years. Private cables assured the State Department that its chief was safe, proceeding with Mrs. Hull to Chile where he will sail home up the west coast of South America (he sailed down the east coast). According to President Justo, who had Argentine news decidedly all his own way, the series of rebellions was “crushed.” It was started, he charged, by friends of the late but deathlessly popular President Dr. Hipolito Irigoyen, undoubtedly the best friend that Argentina’s Forgotten Man ever had (TIME. Sept. 25, et ante).