Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, MARCH 24, 1926. BREAKING THE SEAL OF CONFIDENCE

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 71, 24 March 1926, Page 8

Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, MARCH 24, 1926. BREAKING THE SEAL OF CONFIDENCE

-« The views of the American Ambassador .to the Court of St. James's on the European outlook which have ruffled the habitual calm of London and stirred Paris to fury reached us —in so far as they have reached us even now—in a curious fashion. They were first mentioned in a London message which we published on Monday reporting the' comments of the "Daily Telegraph's" diplomatic correspondent and the "Observer." These comments were not reports, but criticisms based on facts with which the writers assumed their readers to be familiar. The same assumption regarding readers on this side of the world must have been in the mind of the correspondent who transmitted the comments. Yet the only knowledge that they had of the facts was what they could draw by way of inference from the comments themselves, and even now it has only been supplemented by the information derived in a similar way from other comments. How comes it that. the remarkably vigilant and discerning purveyors of our cable news have failed to report by far the most important event in international politics since the deplorable fiasco at Geneva to which it related? A likely explanation seems to be the misunderstanding in London as to the mode of publication. The "Daily Telegraph's" correspondent described the diplomatists of Britain and Europe as "completely taken aback by the action of the American Administration in publishing the report" of its Ambassador. It was natural to assume that official publication of such a document had taken place primarily in the country of its origin, and had the assumption been correct New Zealand and Australia would doubtless have heard about it direct from Washington or New York as quickly as London or Paris. But as the news only reached America via London and Paris, we seem to have fallen between two stools. Of incomparably greater importance, however, than the mistake about the place of publication is that regarding the authority for spy publication at all. A large part, and almost all the justifiable part, of £he indignation which the publication hat excited in Europe was based upon the unfriendliness of so gross a breach of diplomatic propriety on the part of the American Government. But we are assured by the Washington correspondent of the "New York Times," who on this point may be assumed to speak with the authority of the Government, that the publication of the report was entirely unauthorised. Europe, he writes, seems to have obtained the idea that the 'Washington Government not only received such pessimistic reports from Mr. A. B. Houghton (United States Ambassador in London) when he was in Washington last week, but disclosed these reports to the newspapers. These impressions are without warrant. . The Government made no disclosures concerning . what it learned from Mr. Houghton. It denies . that anything Mr. Houghton communicated to it was disclosed to any unofficial person, meaning to' newspapers. So far as the authority for the publication is concerned, this disclaimer is confirmed by the improbability that such a publication, if authorised, would have been confined to foreign countries, and may doubtless be accepted without demur, though we are still in the dark as to how the information reached the newspapers of Europe. It was natural to assume a leakage in the American Embassy in London or Paris, but there was a suggestion in one of yesterday's messages from New York that, though there had been no publication in America, American Press dispatches may have had something to do with it. As to the accuracy as distinct from the authenticity of the disclosures, the disclaimer published by the "New York Times" is less satisfactory. On the face of it the passage quoted repudiates as "without warrant" the idea that the United States Government received "such pessimistic reports" from itß Ambassador. The more specific denial which follows, that there is "any substantial basis for assertions that the pessimistic account of European conditions was a summarisation of what Mr. Houghton told the Secretary of State or President Coolidge" is less satisfactory. "Substantial" is a vague word, and its use in this context indicates that the assertions which purport to be contradicted are at any rate not entirely unfounded. If the opinions attributed to Mr. HoUghton were not very like what he communicated to Mr. Kellogg and Mr. Coolidge, he must have told them something very different from what he told Senator Borah. What; passed between the Ambassador and the Chairman of the Foreign Belations Committee in the Senate, of course, does not bind the Government, but it can hardly be described as unofficial, and we have the Chairman's definite statement that "the newspaper reports did not differ materially from those he had received from the Ambassador." The fact that "The Times" still refers to "the Houghton report" seems to indicate that the published version may be accepted as substan- j

tially accurate, and the same paper's reference to the report as stating "that Europe has learned nothing from the War" supplies another i'lustration of the piecemeal and incidental manner in which the facts are still coming to hand. The nearest approach to a summary that we have had wag supplied by the Australian Press Association from New York yesterday, viz., that the impression in Washington was that Europe vu again an armed camp, and there 1 wu no hope for disarmament; that England and France had combined against Germany at Geneva; that the League of Nations was another "Holly Alliance"; and that the United States had best stay out. That an American Ambassador should have talked in a strain which "The Times" describes as "too sweeping and exaggerated" is very unfortunate. Even more unfortunate than the injustice to Britain, who isv not given to worrying about such things, is the injustice -to France, who is extremely sensitive. But if Mr. Hough ton, who certainly came from Berlin to London with a strong feeling in Germany's favour, really thought these things, it was of course his duty to communicate them to the proper authorities and in confidence. The disastrous thing is that the seal of confidence has been broken by somebody, or that he spoke too freely in circumstances which imposed no obligation of secrecy. The result has made a deplorable addition to the troubles of Europe and postponed the hope of America's active co-operation. But the idea that tLiJ affront to Europe was deliberately contrived with the deliberate purpose of promoting America's isolation must be dismissed as a gross injustice to the American Government.