IMPENDING ELECTIONS IN EUROPE

SEVERAL new elections are pending in Europe: the final run-off for the German Presidency, a Parliamentary election in Belgium, a prospective polling of the same sort in Italy - and at the present moment the anticipated summoning of French voters to the ballot box to decide whether the shaken and discordant Cartel des Gauches or M. Millerand's reformed Bloc is to control the Government. The German Presidential election and the French Parliamentary election, if it occurs, are of most immediate importance.

We are only beginning to learn from Continental sources the detailed manoeuvring that preceded the first German voting for President; but the Conservatives apparently had canvassed the situation aright, for they made desperate efforts to avoid a straight fight between Republicans and Monarchists, even going to the extent of offering to concentrate upon a Democratic candidate of Conservative sympathies in order to divide the vote of their opponents. The present attempt to bring the religious issue into

the polling is a second device of the same kind. But if the Conservatives overcome the combined Republican majority shown at the polls on March 29 by this kind of appeal, they will have subordinated the question of a monarchy or a republic to an extraneous issue. An election won by these tactics will be tantamount to a deferred decision on the main point in dispute- and every such postponement in the present European conjuncture probably favors the perpetuation of Republican institutions.

M. Herriot's Cabinet has been sailing in stormy waters for some time. Political passions at Paris are intensely excited, and issues that can only be settled by conference and compromise have become bones of political contention around each of which there is an infuriated squabble. Last month the Chamber fell into a fury over the religious question and witnessed the wildest scenes during the past twentyfive years. As a result, one of the Clerical delegates-a marquis, by the way

was expelled from the session by force. Public finances show no sign of improvement. A battle is on between

inflationists and anti-inflationists, and between Socialists demanding a capital levy - which means, in theory, making war fortunes pay war debts — and uncompromising defenders of not only the sanctity but also the privacy of private wealth. For the moment M. Caillaux seems to be standing in the background, though he may be posing in the spotlight long before these lines reach our readers. Altogether, the political and industrial situation in France seems at the moment to be deteriorating in about the same degree as the situation in Germany is improving. Perhaps we shall not see marked progress in Europe until a happy accident of political and economic meteorology causes the barometer to rise simultaneously in both countries.

IS THE PROTOCOL DEAD?

AFTER hurriedly summoning the undertaker, the mourners at the funeral of the Protocol apparently hope that it may not be dead after all. At least that is the reaction in a section of the British and the European press. So intent were the reporters of the Geneva proceedings upon Mr. Austen Chamberlain's speech-which, by the way, is rumored to have been written by Lord Balfour, and certainly suggests his style that we heard very little of what was said in the Protocol's defense. M. Briand, speaking for France, and Dr. Benes, echoing him for Czechoslovakia, both indicated that their respective countries proposed to resume a discussion of the subject later. The Spanish delegate stated that his Government stood pat on the Protocol. The two Latin Americans present, while less specific, seem to be sympathetic with that attitude. Japan, Sweden, and Italy were noncommittal.

Meanwhile in Great Britain Ramsay MacDonald makes a Party issue of the

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Protocol and asserts that the present Cabinet has rejected it simply because it was a Labor achievement. The Spectator cautiously observes: "To all outward seeming the Protocol is dead. We put it thus guardedly because it is not always possible to say at what exact moment death has occurred, nor, indeed, is it easy to define death. The British Empire has rejected it, and believes that it is really dead, but M. Herriot and M. Briand believe that life can be restored to it, and have actually expressed their intention of applying artificial respiration at the meeting of the League in September. For our part, we can go so far with the French statesmen as to say that probably parts of the Protocolat least some of its definitions revived.'

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On the other hand, the New Statesman, which has turned ultra-Tory on this issue, declares: 'Great Britain and the Dominions have definitely rejected it, Italy concurs, and no one pretends that there is any chance of Japan accepting. Is it really worth while, in such circumstances, to try to talk cold mutton back into frisky lamb?'

Corriere della Sera points out that after the defeat of the Protocol 'there is no reason to suppose that it will be easy to agree on special alliances.' As for the Versailles Treaty, which France would preserve inviolate, no such agreement 'is fixed and final for all time; if it were, practically every treaty would end in a new war. The essential thing is to provide for an eventual modification of treaties without a rupture of amicable relations.' Pending an opportunity to resume the discussion of the Protocol with better chances of success, this journal advocates a security pact including England, France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, and perhaps Poland and Czechoslovakia. If this could be brought about, 'all Europe would

have attained the substance of unity and would at last be able to settle down with the sense of safety indispensable for any real economic recovery.'

Naturally the press of Switzerland, a country which owes its very existence to a sort of Protocol, refuses to believe that the Geneva Pact is dead. Journal de Genève protests that when the English begin to imagine things they have a terrible time of it. Ask your phlegmatic Britisher what he thinks of the Protocol and his morbid imagination at once begins to boil. 'He discovers the most extraordinary and unbelievable possibilities. He pictures the British fleet in dire peril. Before his terrified eyes the responsibilities of the British Empire swell to apocalyptic dimensions.' He refuses to see the even greater possibilities of peril in another world-conflagration, and persists in conceiving his country as a placid oasis of verdure in the midst of a stormwrecked world. What is to be the result? 'Britain will come back to the Protocol or something similar. That is inevitable. She will liberate herself from the tutelage of her Dominions, which will eventually become intolerable, and we shall hear Mr. Chamberlain again, better informed than this time, read a speech that will not have been penned by Lord Balfour."

Neue Zürcher Zeitung's Geneva correspondent less picturesquely describes the situation as follows:

The setback is painful. Last September the birth of the Geneva Protocol was greeted here as a well-calculated effort to solve the cardinal issue of security, not by the dangerous device of military alliances and special treaties, but upon a basis of com

pulsory arbitration. MacDonald's stirring speech endorsing this plan and Herriot's equally eloquent advocacy the following day still echo in our ears. At that moment something really new seemed to have issued out of high diplomacy, for the responsible

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This correspondent interprets Great Britain's manoeuvres at Geneva as a recurrence of her old device of making some other fellow do her work for her. Instead of guaranteeing France security herself, she now proposes to get Germany to do the job.

Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, which represents Conservative industrial interests of the Stinnes type, fairly gloats over the 'irrefutable logic and frequent shafts of biting sarcasm - which are said to have had a crushing effect upon the French delegation - with which Chamberlain fought over the English thesis.' Frankfurter Zeitung, which stands at the opposite pole of Germany's bourgeois press world from the journal just quoted, likewise sees much sense in Chamberlain's objection to the Protocol. Unless the United States is a party to that agreement, it is not worth much. Furthermore, the English nation can hardly be expected honestly to pledge the support of its army and navy in a possible war to defend political boundaries or to impose political sanctions on other nations which the moral instincts of the people disapprove. But there were other considerations lurking in Chamberlain's mind which he did not put into his address. In conversing with a party of journalists at his hotel, he pointed out that England, whose territories were coterminous in many places with those of countries having a very different and a lower-grade civilization, could not possibly bind herself to submit every dispute with her neighbors to an international court of justice. 'When he said that, Chamberlain was surely thinking of Egypt, although

that country is not yet a member of the League. At the same time he obviously forgot that under the League Covenant England is already obligated to submit to the League Council a controversy with any other League member that is likely to cause a war, whether that other League member be on the same level of civilization with Great Britain or not.' The kernel of the situation is that Great Britain is unwilling to bind herself to accept the decrees of an international court of justice.

Turning to France, Le Figaro says that the Geneva decision resolves itself into this:

England and her friends have not the same ideas as France and her allies on the way to establish peace. Their respective ideals as well as their practical proposals differ widely. England is filled with the spirit of moralizing imperialism, France with a spirit of juridico-parliamentary internationalism.

But, after all, these different points of view are as much the product of physical conditions as of temperament. 'We do not think that our English friends would evacuate Gibraltar, Malta, Egypt, and Singapore in exchange for a collective pact of the riparian governments along the way guaranteeing her her route to India and the Orient.'

Journal des Débats, which is fighting M. Herriot's Government, is inclined to compliment Mr. Chamberlain. It says his speech, ‘barring a few passages of British humor,' was such a speech as France ought to have made on several occasions, notably last September, and it calls upon MM. Herriot and Briand MM. Herriot and Briand to take note of the situation and change their course accordingly.

Le Temps was particularly struck by a certain harshness and asperity in Mr. Chamberlain's address which it says 'was quite outside of his usual manner.' While agreeing with some of his specific

criticisms, it deplores his attitude as a whole. 'What the British Government has repudiated with an energy singularly surprising in discussing measures to guarantee better general security is the very spirit in which the Protocol was conceived and drafted is the very gist of the solution that was contemplated at Geneva and that the delegates of the forty-six Powers represented there unhesitatingly accepted.'

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What next? Le Figaro heads its answer to this question, 'From Geneva to Washington.' It speaks of the Dominions who vetoed British acceptance of the Protocol as 'imbued with American ideas.' The same people in Great Britain who the Protocol oppose a guaranty treaty with France. 'Lord Balfour, who presided over the British delegation at Geneva and also played a leading rôle at the Washington Conference, is an outright enemy of both the Protocol and an Anglo-French pact. . . . Are we too bold in affirming that there is an understanding between the adversaries of the Protocol in England and the American partisans of a new Disarmament Conference? that, in the same way that the invitation to the Conference in 1921 came from Washington but had been suggested by London, so in 1925 political opinion in America is manœuvred by certain leaders of opinion in England — by those men who consider the British Empire something utterly aloof from Europe?'

Of course, this does not mean all Englishmen. The London Outlook says the feelers thrown out by Washington for a new Conference have been received hospitably by Downing Street and favorably by Italy. 'France, on the other hand, having security on the brain, is raising obstacles; while Japan is noncommittal, waiting to see which way the wind will blow.' To which the editor adds:

As a whole I can see no objection to the proposed Conference, but at the same time it would be idle to expect any very important results. I don't think that we need suspect America of any ulterior motive. But the organizers of 'peace conferences,' however idealistic their intent, have a habit of not recognizing facts as facts. You cannot get rid of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans by covenants or protocols, nor of 'tradition, customs, institutions, habits, race,' as Senator Borah once wisely said, 'through the necromancy of words.'

The Nation and the Athenæum thinks the rejection of President Coolidge's nomination of Mr. Warren to the Attorney-Generalship is a bad omen for such a Conference, because it suggests that America as a whole may not back up what her delegates agree to at such a meeting:

THE first reception of President Coolidge's award covering the conditions of a plebiscite in the disputed provinces of Tacna and Arica, to decide whether they shall remain under the jurisdiction of Chile or be returned to Peru, apparently was more favorably received in the latter country than the telegraphic reports of subsequent protests would suggest. Bolivia, which sees no likelihood of regaining a corridor to the sea by the Washington decision, looked coolly upon it from the first. Lima opinion was probably divided along political lines. Supporters of the present administration, whose mouthpiece is La Prensa, were predisposed to regard the results of the arbitration as

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satisfactory, partly because such an outcome would profit the party in power. That journal published ten points in the award which it regarded as favoring Peru's contention. But dispatches from La Paz in the Buenos Aires press reported popular manifestations in Lima against the decision, and a fall of several points in Peruvian exchange was attributed to the same cause. On the other hand, no alloy of uncertainty tempered Chile's approval of the award. Even El Diario Ilustrado, President Alessandri's most belligerent and uncompromising critic, at once declared that the successful outcome of the arbitration would strengthen the Executive's position and hasten a return to normal political conditions in that country. Some Brazilian papers were critical. A Noticia of Rio de Janeiro said that such a plebiscite as was proposed would not settle the controversy, because it was a foregone conclusion that the voting would favor Chile.

THE Netherlands is indulging in a lively controversy over the reported offer of certain wealthy concerns having property interests in the Dutch East Indies to endow a school for training colonial servants at the University of Utrecht. Hitherto the aspirants for that service have been trained at the University of Leyden, which has a faculty of six professors of high repute to deal with different aspects of colonial administration. Business interests, it is said, are finding fault because 'the Leyden professors give undue emphasis to questions of ethics, and their teachings on the responsibility of foreign capitalism to the natives are liable to misinterpretation.' The result, it is said, is to encourage ‘a revolutionary atmosphere against Dutch rule among the natives,' and in general an attitude hostile to big capitalism. The contro