Gold, Geneva & Lausanne

Ever since the boom days of 1929, a League of Nations commission has been studying world monetary problems. Last week it made majority and minority reports.

Vehement in the minority was Belgian Commission Chairman Albert Janssen. With the Indian and South African members, he advocated on a world scale measures akin to the Goldsborough Bill in the U. S., advised "international action of the gold-standard countries to restore world wholesale commodity prices to the 1928 level."

The League majority, flatly disagreeing with Chairman Janssen, was headed by Economist George Bassett Roberts of Manhattan's National City Bank, successor on the commission to his father George Evan Roberts, who was director of the U. S. Mint under Presidents McKinley, Roosevelt and Taft. Upholding the gold standard, the majority, or Roberts report, urged every nation that can do so to stick to gold, flayed proposals for bimetallism or a return to the silver standard.

"The world's total stock of monetary gold," flatly opined the majority report, "has at all times in recent years been adequate to support the credit structure legitimately required by world trade, and the rapid decline of prices which began in 1929 cannot be attributed to any deficiency in the gold supply."

"Great Determination." With this good-as-gold advice to hearten them, Europe's leading statesmen set off again for Switzerland last week, planned to resurrect the moribund Geneva Disarmament Conference and to convene June 16 the Lausanne Conference which must take quick action on Reparations & War Debts because the Hoover Moratorium expires June 30.

James Ramsay MacDonald, glowing inspirer of many a conference, received a cold douche shortly before he left London, was visited at No. 10 Downing St. by intense, teacherish President Eamon de Valera of the Irish Free State. In five minutes the Scotsman and the Irishman had disagreed flatly concerning the Free State's right to abolish her Deputies' oath of fealty to England's King. Tight-lipped and hard-eyed, President de Valera left for Dublin and the Prime Minister's car sped from Downing Street to Buckingham Palace. As he has done several times before, George V succeeded in bucking up Scot MacDonald who had entered the Palace glum, emerged beaming to catch the train for Paris with Sir John Simon, his Foreign Minister. The Press asked: "Are you leaving with great hopes?" The Prime Minister nodded vigorously but the Foreign Minister said, "I am leaving with great determination."

Firstconferences in Paris with Premier Edouard Herriot again visibly discouraged Scot MacDonald, but gradually the two statesmen felt their way back to that amicable ground on which they stood in 1924. Shoulder to shoulder then, they made possible the Dawes Plan which, though it failed, was better than no plan and marked a first step toward solving the same old problems that faced M. Herriot and Mr. MacDonald last week. After a three-hour conference and a formal luncheon, the two statesmen motored out to Versailles, wandered together around Queen Marie Antoinette's "Play Village," had tea with Socialite Sir Charles Mendl, motored back to Paris in high good humor, dined at the British Embassy and left next morning for Switzerland on the same train.

The Paris Matin released officially-inspired rumors that the two Premiers had reached sufficient agreement to present a united Franco-British front to Germany. As the German Delegation left Berlin, Chancellor von Papen's position was that Germany can pay nothing more in Reparations and cannot even accept an extension of the Hoover Moratorium, under which the principle of German payment is upheld by having the Reich pay comparatively small sums into the Bank for International Settlements which are then re-loaned to Germany. The German demand to be presented at Lausanne was for total cancellation of Reparations with no strings attached.

Shoulder to Shoulder? Prospects at Geneva, according to French sources close to the Cabinet, were for a joint Franco-British declaration of intent to reduce arms expenditures by from 5% to 10%, the hope being that if Mr. MacDonald and M. Herriot thus pledged themselves other nations might follow.

Prospects at Lausanne were that M. Herriot and Mr. MacDonald would induce the Conference to declare a so-called "short moratorium" on Reparations & Debts until after the U. S. elections. Members of the British Delegation made clear that the French had listened coldly to the following typical MacDonald proposal: Let the Allied Powers make a great gesture at Lausanne by relinquishing their right to German Reparations, trusting that this example would move the U. S. to relinquish its right to repayment of the Allied War Debts.

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