Rebuff Rebuffed

Between the pudgy, rheumatic yet capable fingers of a great statesman a pen quivered. Aristide Briand was signing, last week, a cablegram to Frank Billings Kellogg. This was the third vital stroke in a game of diplomatic shuttlecock played since last spring between the Foreign Minister of France and the U. S. Secretary of State.

First Stroke. M. Briand despatched to Mr. Kellogg a proposal that France and the U. S. should sign a two-power treaty perpetually "outlawing war" between their countries (TIME, July 4).

Second Stroke. Secretary Kellogg replied by despatching to Paris an alternative plan: 1) The treaty should not "outlaw war," but "renounce war as an instrument of national policy;"* and 2) The treaty should not be a two-power affair but a "multilateral compact" signed with the U.S. and France by all the Great Powers.

In effect, France was rebuffed for proposing that she alone should be publicly linked in amity with M. L'Oncle Sam.

Third Stroke. Thus rebuffed, Foreign Minister Briand rebuffed back at Secretary Kellogg, last week, by "accepting in principle" the U. S. plan, but in such language that he virtually put forward a new and third proposal. He suggested that a treaty "renouncing aggressive warfare" between France and the U. S. should be signed at once, and that this document should be expanded and transfused, at some future date, into a general treaty among the Powers.

At Washington the State Department did not officially return the shuttlecock, last week, but Mr. Kellogg evinced displeasure and let it be known that the negotiations would probably have to begin anew from original premises. From Paris a spiteful imputation was hurled by Le Quotidien: "In America it would be fine for the election prospects of the Republican party if, after having overthrown the work of Woodrow Wilson, they could pose as the real founders of peace among nations. . . . But why should France play that game?" That is to say, France may prefer to work for universal peace through the League of Nations, and not through a U. S.-sponsored "multilateral pact."

*The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee publicly made known its mystification as to just how much "renouncing war" differs from "outlawing war."