Foreign News: Arms and the French

The abrupt ending of the London debt conference gave Europe a chance to remember that Henry Lewis Stimson had originally gone to Europe to drum up enthusiasm for the League of Nations Disarmament Conference to be held in Geneva next February.

France did not forget. Even before the statesmen in London had packed their portfolios, the French Foreign Office sent a message to Geneva. Officially it was an answer to the League’s request for information and suggestions to facilitate the approaching conference. Actually it was a statement and a warning to the rest of the world, setting forth very clearly France’s position on disarmament. The French seemed to have Messrs. Hoover and Stimson much in mind. To make sure that there would be no misunderstanding of their position in English-speaking countries the English text of the memorandum was headed by a phrase seldom seen on League documents: “Translation supplied by the French Government.” Bluntly, the position of France last week on disarmament was the same as her position on a new German loan: no further concessions without definite guarantees.

France, said the memorandum, has been reducing her military forces ever since the League Covenant went into effect. Her military forces in France proper are just 60%, of what they were in 1921, in other words approximately the same percentage of reduction that the U. S. has made in its home forces. There can be no further reductions unless French security is guaranteed by the powers signing the disarmament agreement. “Nothing short of such assistance [political guarantees] will avail to reduce those differences between geographical situation and circumstances of the several countries which constitute the chief obstacle in the way of a simultaneous reduction of armaments.”

It was the same demand that France has been making at every disarmament conference since the War. It has always come to grief through Washington’s insistence that the U. S. cannot enter any European political alliance. Last fortnight the policy of Isolation apparently went by the board when the U. S. took the lead in an international economic conference. Was the U. S. thinking of giving up her political isolation too? The idea was certainly at the back of many French minds last week.

Reaction. Little enthusiasm for the French memorandum was visible last week. State Department officials in Washington, scratching their chins, said that it was “at least a starting point.” The best that League officials at Geneva could think of was “there is some satisfaction in the thought that France has laid her cards on the table so far in advance.” Germany and Italy were frankly hostile. Said the Berlin Deutsche Tageszeitung: “This thesis bars the only way that may lead to an increase of Germany’s security and to a reduction of the crushing superiority of the armed nations. As France demands a system of sanctions and England has always opposed such a system, it looks as though France wants to prevent any disarmament at all.”

Said Il Tevere of Rome:

“France does not give up her naval pretensions. France does not give up her land pretensions. France refuses parity of any sort. France proclaims her imperial necessity.

“But Europe appears truly determined to face and cure its ills. Will it halt in indecision before these new manifestations of an egotism which feeds on itself, consuming itself?”