The Dominion FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 1923. A SPHINX-LIKE PRESIDENT

Dominion, Volume 18, Issue 56, 30 November 1923, Page 6

The Dominion FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 1923. A SPHINX-LIKE PRESIDENT

ft In Me. Woolrow Wilson the United States had a President who never tired of lecturing his countrymen and the world at large on great questions of policy. In this respect, Me. Calvin Coolidoe is the very antithesis of Me. Wilson. It is now nearly four months since Me. Coolidge stepped into the place made vacant by the death of the late President Hakding. In that period he has had remarkably little to say on the subject of either domestic or foreign policy.

According to a British correspondent at Washington, the picture of President Coolidge which the American Press is painting in the public mind is a sort, of cross between a sphinx and an oyster. Occasions, of course, arise when the President is bound to speak in public, but on these occasions he demonstrates that it is one thing to speak and another to. be communicative.

An excellent example of his guarded and non-committal utterances was a speech he delivered at the annual meeting of the American Red Cross. Claiming that the essence of America was practical idealism, he said that this had been illustrated

in the character of the men who pl anted colonies in the wilderness and raised up great States around the church and the . . . and who went to the rescue of Europe with their treasure and their men when their own liberty and the liberty cf the world were in peril, but when the victory was secure retired! from the field unencumbered by spoils, independent, unattached, and unbou ght, still continuing to contribute lavishly to the relief of the stricken and destitute of the Old World. . . . . Such has been the moral purpose that has marked the conduct of our country up to the present hou r. The American people have never adopted, and are not likely to adopt, any other course.

In America “isolationists” and advocates of League of Nations membership alike hailed this speech as an affirmation of their respective ‘views. In other countries people are left to wonder what the course is that Peesident Coolidge is so sure America will follow. As a result of his reticent caution, President Coolidge retains an exceptionally free hand, and the Message ho is to deliver shortly to Congress is awaited with corresponding interest and expectancy. As yet, however, there is no indication that America under his leadership is likely to show active initiative in co-operating to promote a European settlement. There is a good deal to suggest the contrary.

Silent or reticent as he has been on nearly all other policy questions, Mr. Coolidge has explicitly endorsed the view that the question of inter-Allied war debts to America is entirely separate from that of reparations. This attitude may appear to correspond ill with Me. Coolidge’s own laudation of America’s “practical idealism.” It finds its explanation, however, in a general and apparently wellfounded belief that any America statesman who proposed to write off, or even write down, these debts would be committing political suicide.

The simple truth appears to be that effective intervention by America in Euopear. affairs is barred, for the time at least, by the trend of American popular opinion on the subject of inter-Allied debts.

Any early change in this rather unpromising state of affairs is the less to bo expected since perplexing issues of domestic policy are of necessity making heavy claims on the attention of President Coolidge and other party leaders in the United States. The position from this standpoint was tersely summed up not long ago by the Washington correspondent of the London 7'ws: There is the agonising and un savoury matter of prohibition ; there is the steady and apparently unavoid able loss of £10,000,000 to £12,000,000 a year on the merchant.marine; there is the discontent among the farmers of the West; there is the proble in of the railroads, intimately allied with the discontent of the farmers and with the position of organised labour ; there is the proposal to gjlow some modification of the tariff; there is the question of immigration; there are the taxes —all these and a score more, and behind them a Congress in which the balance of parties is so nearly even that. little accomplish ment, at least in a partisan sense, can be expected. It is believed that President Coolidge has good prospects of being nominated by his party for a further term, but there is every likelihood that the election of 1924 will find both the Republican Party and its Presidential candidate fighting hard to avert defeat on domestic issues.

There is one factor, however, that possibly may impel America to adopt a broader and more enlightened foreign policy. The discontented Western farmers to whom the Times correspondent alludes are a power in the land. They are, as he observes, numerically powerful enough to be the determining factor in a Presidential election. These farmers need stable external markets for their wheat, and it is claimed on their behalf that the markets required are to be found only in Europe, and that the United States on that account must assist to stabilise European economic conditions. The recognition of these claims would be a first step towards the development in America of a new outlook on the related problems of reparations and inter-Allied debts. (