Ready for Roosevelt

"I can't stand the noise on the first floor!" cried temperamental new French Premier & Foreign Minister Joseph Paul-Boncour in the French Foreign Ministry last week, ordered his office moved upstairs into the Queen's Bedroom.

Surprised functionaries feebly protested. The Royal Apartments at the Foreign Office of the French Republic have thus far been strictly reserved for visiting sovereigns. In the Queen's Bedroom have slept, at one time or another, all of Europe's better queens, including England's Mary. As for noise, the first floor was not too noisy for the late, great Aristide Briand, eleven times Premier of France. Foreign Minister almost continuously for seven years. But M. Paul-Boncour is M. Paul-Boncour, a fashionable lawyer with a knack of creating well-bred sensations. He turned French decorators loose in the Queen's Bedroom, gave them carte blanche to make it a quiet, tasteful office. Also last week he completed long-distance negotiations with the German Government which may profoundly change the tariff and quota systems not only of Europe but of the world.

Basic in European trade relations until very recently was the Franco-German Commercial Treaty signed Aug. 17, 1927 and afterward the model of many another. Covering roughly two-thirds of the items on French and German tariff lists, the treaty has stabilized rates on these items. Last week Germany and France amended their Treaty of 1927 to permit either party to raise or lower all but a few rates on 15 days notice. Thus they all but tore up a document hailed when it was signed as a. great stabilizer of European trade. Still more ominously they adopted a new interpretation of the so-called "most favored nation clause," which virtually tears that up.

Normally this clause, which figures in numberless trade treaties, has been a blanket clause. When states A and B signed a most-favored-nation treaty each pledged that it would grant to the other all trade favors (such as lower tariff rates) which it might grant to any third state. Last week France and Germany agreed that such treatment shall no longer apply to all but hereafter only to specified items of trade. Clearly this opens the way to unlimited trade haggling between states. It was said in Berlin last week that France urged and won the new interpretation so as to be free to bicker & dicker, after March 4, with President Roosevelt who has indicated that he favors bargaining methods to adjust the world's tariff problems.

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