No Grass Growing

Important in the week's developments on international naval reductions was a statement of Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald:

"We have allowed no grass to grow under our feet. We've already started conversations with the United States. I am not a prophet and I am not going to pose as one able to prophetize, but today we had the second conversation with General Dawes and Mr. Gibson, and I am very hopeful."

So rapid in fact were the moves of U. S. Ambassadors Dawes and Gibson and Prime Minister MacDonald, that tactful hints were sent out from both Washington and the British Foreign Office to slow things down a trifle lest another five-power naval conference be called before adequate preliminary work is accomplished.

The headlong pacifiers, checked, promised to move cautiously against a repetition of the 1927 Geneva Conference fiasco. Meanwhile disarmament sentiment was growing in Britain. Impulsive was the suggestion of Charles Kingsley Webster, professor of International Politics at the University of Wales, Wartime member of the British General Staff, that Britain should abandon her naval bases in the Caribbean as a gesture of international goodwill. For home consumption he pointed out that the West Indian stations were expensive and of small value, and added:

"We could produce an immediate effect on American opinion if we made clear, as we might have done long ago, that we have abandoned our naval bases in the Caribbean. In policy we have long recognized that the United States has a paramount interest there and it is time we demonstrated clearly that our strategy recognizes that fact."

To the alarm of British diehards and the delight of U. S. seadogs, several British periodicals picked up this suggestion and pressed it editorially. Britain's "bases" at Bermuda, Nassau, Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados constitute moral if not actually military threats to the Panama Canal.