Golden Rule Conference

INTERNATIONAL

Golden Rule Conference

Peace on earth, free trade among nations and equality between the sexes were three noble ideals of which the Seventh Pan-American Conference in Montevideo last week nobly voted approval (with reservations).

Exercises lasting three hours were devoted to Peace, while savage jungle warfare raged less than 800 miles away in the Gran Chaco (see p. 16). Pointing out that five peace pacts of American application now exist, Argentina's courtly, old-school Foreign Secretary Carlos Saavedra Lamas urged that such of the 18 American nations present as had not signed all five should sign as many as they could as soon as they could. Rising to announce that the U. S. will sign Argentina's Pact, Secretary of State Hull praised "the Golden Rule, by which we mean the true goodwill of the true good neighbor. ... As President Roosevelt has defined the 'good neighbor,' he resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others. . . ."

Free trade which is Secretary Hull's specialty (and anathema to the Roosevelt Brain Trust) was unanimously endorsed. The Conference adopted by acclaim a resolution presented by Mr. Hull with the statement that ''this proposal calls for no treaties, conventions or legal commitments." It amounted to expression of a wish that American nations should work to make trade free.

Even this diplomatic ectoplasm was promptly challenged by ex-Brain-Trusty Raymond Moley. Speaking in Manhattan Professor Moley declared that the success of the President's recovery program demands the prop of selectively higher tariffs. "This has made it necessary," said Professor Moley, "to defer and perhaps to blast the hopes of old-fashioned Democrats who cherish the belief that social justice can only come through more international trade."

On the score of equality of the sexes the Conference voted to submit to all member states a draft treaty under which "equal nationality rights" would be guaranteed to women, and to recommend that all countries grant them "civil and political equality." Secretary Hull, acting on cabled orders from Washington, abstained from voting for the resolution because there is a faction in the Administration, led by the President's wife, which favors granting to women at work and in the home more than equal rights with men.

Only rift in the Conference proceedings came when Cuban Chief Delegate Angel Giraudy interrupted a debate to say: "I declare with deliberation that the United States is intervening in Cuba, strongly intervening! No United States Marines have landed, but the United States has been engaged in intrigue against our president and his Government through Ambassador Sumner Welles [see p. 15]. If that is not intervention, what is?"

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