Millions for Czechoslovakia

In the House of Commons this week Neville Chamberlain dramatically announced that His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom is opening a British credit of $50,000,000* for the Czechoslovak Government in response to an appeal from President Eduard Benes that Czechoslovakia receive an immediate international loan of $150,000,000 to rehabilitate homeless Czechs, rebuild lost industries and fortifications.

These are, in Eastern Europe, staggeringly large sums. About $25,000,000 has been the customary size of a loan to one of these little states by a great power, when it has been desired to sew up an alliance or break one off. Turkey recently considered herself lucky to get a loan of $30,000,000--her price for switching from the German to the British side. In the House of Commons this week, the Opposition, which had been crying "Shame!" at the Prime Minister and stressing "friendship" for Czechoslovakia without proposing measures of succor, was politically thunderstruck. It was obvious that the Czechs & Slovaks may find it good business to get rid of 3,250,000 Sudeten Germans in exchange for a loan of $150,000,000 -or about $46 per blond Sudeten squarehead. The startled House could not but suspect that smart Dr. Benes had been secretly tipped off by Mr. Chamberlain beforehand as to how much wiser it might prove financially to yield the Sudetenland rather than fight.

Anthony Eden, who had been expected to land heavy verbal blows on Neville Chamberlain, frowningly told the House: "Now that the world can breathe again it is the duty of everyone to take stock. A great national effort is called for to ensure that Europe will never again appear so near the abyss."

Aristocratic Mr. Eden's aristocratic friend, Alfred Duff Cooper, who last week resigned as First Lord of the British Admiralty in "protest" at the Munich settlement, although he personally saw Neville Chamberlain off with good wishes (see p. 16), spoke up sharply. Chamberlain dealt with Hitler "in the language of sweet reasonableness," Duff Cooper told the House, in a speech interrupted by his sobbing, "whereas the mailed fist is the only language Hitler understands!" Germany would have backed down, said Mr. Duff Cooper, if Britain had sooner mobilized her fleet, which was under his command as First Lord.

Said Sir Archibald Sinclair, leader of the Liberal Opposition: "We have not only given the Sudetenland to the Reich! We have restored Germany to Hitler and Italy to Mussolini!"

An even graver view was taken by the leader of His Majesty's loyal opposition, Laborite Clement Attlee: "We have witnessed a degeneration of the world, due to failure to deal with economic difficulties created by the [Versailles] Peace Treaties, and by failure to deal with force. . . . This is not the time for Four-Power Pacts and new alliances of Power and Politics. This is the time for a new Peace Conference--an All-in-All Peace Conference to which should be called America and Russia . . . Chamberlain has been duped."

In the House of Lords, Labor's Spokesman Lord Snell of Plumstead sounded the same challenge: "Conferences should become the habit. We should include Germany and Russia--all countries willing to work for Peace."

"We could have engaged in a war of indefinite duration," Foreign Secretary Viscount Halifax countered to the House of Lords. "If we had won, nobody, in settling the boundaries of Czechoslovakia, would have redrawn them as they were left by the Treaty of Versailles." Lord Halifax said the reason why Russia was not invited to Munich was that, if she had been, then neither Germany nor Italy would have attended. Concluded the tall, ascetic Viscount, who has a nationwide British reputation in Church circles for spirituality and moral leadership: "I have taken no decision which, on all the facts as I knew them, was not right.

" The tall, ascetic Opposition pillar of British morality, Viscount Cecil, rebutted: "I suggest that the Four Power Conference was to enable Hitler to get out of his [Godesberg] position with the least loss of reputation!"

*To be instantly advanced by the Bank of England which will later be repaid from the Exchequer.

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