"Pillars of Peace"

The Inter-American Conference at Buenos Aires was so dwarfed when it convened last week by the towering fireworks of President Roosevelt's swing along Latin America (see p. 13), that even this week it will scarcely get down to action. As the President sped homeward, however, Secretary of State Cordell Hull gave the entire world some authentic moments of exhilaration with a speech which made it seem that those popular peace men Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann lived again--also that the admirable Briand-Kellogg Peace Pact "Renouncing War as an Instrument of National Policy" had all its original freshness and bloom.

Just as the toiling masses have thus far invariably been betrayed by labor leaders sooner or later, so the peaceful majority of mankind have never yet found political leaders who did not ultimately conduct them into war, however reluctantly. Today Mr. Hull burns with righteous indignation at the gall and wormwood of the rearmament cup which all States are now brewing. So burned President Woodrow Wilson, and so to burn is in the best U. S.

tradition. Last week Secretary Hull, in words which every normal U. S. citizen could instinctively imagine, worked the Conference up to a frenzy of cheers and himself to enthusiastic and forceful gestures as he proposed "Pillars of Peace" for the American Republics. He implored the Conference then & there to drop everything else and unanimously endorse a series of five existing peace accords of which the Briand-Kellogg pact is the most important.

Secretary Hull said that he had previously obtained assent from the steering committee for the Conference, by a suspension of the rules, to grasp its supreme opportunity of erecting the Pillars of Peace immediately. To observers unfamiliar with the workings of human nature on such occasions, the Conference seemed to rise in a tempest of aspiration toward Peace. At this moment, however, Mr. Oswaldo Aranha, who ordinarily resides in Washington, D. C. and who as the Ambassador of Brazil is a constant professional acquaintance of the Secretary of State, sprang to his feet. His unanswerable argument was that if at a Conference one delegate can ask everyone to drop everything and vote his measure, then so can every other delegate. To meet this unpleasant fact of life, conferences many years ago invented committees to steer them. It was thus the fate of the Hull Pillars this week to be steered back to the steering committee. The Secretary of State, who is never downhearted or discouraged, commenced a lobbying campaign to nurse his brain children into health & strength while other statesmen give birth to theirs. Not wicked but as good as most mothers, the Conference statesmen pursued their Destiny.

Lucky winner gets $40,000 from the Nobel Peace Prize. The President of the Conference, Argentine Foreign Minister Carlos Saavedra Lamas, got his just before the statesmen reached Buenos Aires (TIME, Dec. 7). This week Adolf Hitler held still locked up in a Berlin sanatorium Nobel Peace Prizeman Carl von Ossietzky. Although the Prize Prisoner protested that his health is quite good enough for him to go to Norway and receive the $40,000 which the Nobel Committee wants to give him as a slap at Dictatorship (TIME, Dec. 7), Nazi newsorgans stated firmly that Nazi doctors do not think Pacifist von Ossietzky, whom they call a "traitor to Germany," can leave the sanatorium to which he was hustled from a Nazi prison camp when he seemed about to get the Prize.

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