Evening Post. MONDAY, APRIL 14, 1930. CONFERENCE RESULTS

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 88, 14 April 1930, Page 10

Evening Post. MONDAY, APRIL 14, 1930. CONFERENCE RESULTS

The Five-Power C9nference has failed, biit the Three Powers whose disagreement at Geneva in 1927 administered, so severe a blow to the world's hopes of peace and to the harmony of the English-spealdng Powers have made amends by coming to an agreement on their own account. BoSh. President Hoover and the British Prime Minister have expressed their satisfaction with the result. The former, who speaks with the greater detachment because he has not been personally engaged in the negotiations, commends the United States delegates for "their courageous actions and most constructive accomplishment." - It is, he says, the abolition of competition in the construction of naval arms. The Three-Power Agreement will certainly take the world a very long way towards the millennium if that description is justified, but it must be remembered that, though Mr. Hoover is a man of a less emotional temperament and of cooler judgment than Mr.. Mac Donald, he speaks for a nation for which foreign policy and naval competition are much simpler matters than they are for Britain. It is to Mr. MaeDonald's credit that in a moment which must have combined triumph and relief in about equal proportions he was Very modest in his claim. He, expressed "satisfaction with the results of the Conference*' without any epithet, and merely described them as representing a substantial step in the direction towatds •which.they had been striving in the face of difficulties which at times seemed insurmountable. On the personal side, what the First Lord of the Admiralty calls "the unanimous recognition accorded by the delegations to the ability, patience, and goodwill of Mr. Ramsay MacDohald," is riot likely to be disputed. He has not done all that he set out to do, but without an almost unlimited display of these qualities no advance at all would have been possible. The two points on which his diplomacy is assailable —the offer to reduce the Empire's cruiser strength from 70 to 50 in order to conciliate the United States and the further estrangement of Frdnce by'the apparent substitution of a new Entente for the old onehad arisen before the Conference opened. By their attitude throughout the Conference the British newspapers have fully earned Mr. Mac Donald's gratitude "for the way they helped Us, not only in what they said, but also in what they left unsaid." Under the second head the hushing up of the American delegation's demand for a super-Rodney was a great achievement. But previously to the Conference we should have been glad to see the Press a good deal more critical of the cruiser concessions which he had offered in the course of his negotiations at Washington. Diplomacy is normally a matter of give-and-take, but these concessions looked like give-and-no-take,. and the giving seenied dangerous, not necessarily on that account but as lowering the protection of the Empire's trade routes and communications about thirty per cent, below what had less than three years previously been fixed as the safety limit. And one of the reasons given by Mr. Mac Donald for the change was the signing 'of the Kellogg Pact, a document which represents hope and aspiration rather than achievement, and may have the reverse of a pacific effect if one party builds upon it while the others do not. Yet the "Daily Telegraph" and its naval correspondent were almost alone in strenuously and persistently protesting against the sacrifice which was the starting point of Mr. Mac Donald's negotiations. But whatever the House of Commons may think of the risk which lies at the root of Mr. Mac Donald's diplomacy it is too late for effective interference now. To reject the proposed Three-Power Agreement at this stage would be a far greater disaster than the fiasco of 1927, and would embitter Britain's relations with the United States and lower her prestige in a way that would probably entail a more serious risk than the scrapping of so many cruisers. Apart from this one point, Mr. Mac Donald may be congratulated on the success which has attended his policy of putting all his cards on the table at the start, and on the skilful conduct of the Conference without which that success would not have been possible. The Geneva Conference was wrecked by a head-on collision between* the British demand for a large number i of small cruisers and the American demand for a small number of larger cruisers. The demands were quite rationally based on the respective needs of the two Powers, but the irrational attempt to reconcile them on the basis of an exact parity in both classes could only have succeeded by the surrender of one of the parties. The solution has now been founs in

a compromise which seems to apply a perfectly sound principle in a reasonable way. The need of the United States in 8-inch gun cruisers is not to set the standard for Britain, nor will Britain's need in 6-inch gun cruisers set the standard for the United States. Within an approximate parity of aggregate cruiser strength—an aggregate, as the First Lord of the Admiralty points out, much lower than what the Geneva Conference attempted to fix—each Power is given a superiority over the other in the class that it particularly needs. In 8-inch cruisers the United States may build up to 180,000 tons against Britain's 146,800, but the superiority is almost precisely balanced by Britain's allowance of 192,----200 in small cruiser tonnage to the 149,500 of the United States. Other valuable features of the agreement are the postponement from 1931 till 1935 by the three Powers concerned of their rights to build capital ships under the Washington Treaty, and the reduction of such ships to the numbers fixed by the Treaty "with the least possible delay" instead of waiting till 1936. Only in ohe case is any clear indication given of the manner in which the results of the Conference have been received by the nations concerned. The French newspapers are said to hail the end of the Conference with relief, though they blame Italy and not their own country for the failure to conclude a Five-Power Agreement. They emphasise, however, the fact that Franco has emerged with her naval programme intact and freedom of action unimpaired, especially in submarines. The naval ambition. of France is a trouble for British diplomacy, in which the United States and Japan have no. share, yet it cannot be the doubt on this score or any other that accounts for the strange silence of the British Press. The real danger to the Three-Power Agreement will come from the United States. Public opinion there is described today as "curiously mixed." President Hoover's exposition of the Agreement "caused hardly a ripple of excitement." Mn F. Britten, the antiBritish Chairman of the House Naval Committee, sees in it an astute move of the Admiralty "to assure British predominance at sea for all time." Senator Borah is struck dumb. And in the Senate, where a two-thirds majority will be needed to ratify the Agreement, anything might happen, especially if, as is quite probable, - the Republicans suffer a reverse at the coming elections.