WILL AMERICA BE PAID.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVI, Issue 11, 24 December 1925, Page 4

WILL AMERICA BE PAID.

Tt has remained for the United States itself to produce an out-and-out pessimistic economist on the subject of fol' repayment of the Allies’ war debts to America. The view of Dr. T. S. Adams, Professor of Economy at Yale University, given unreservedly before a ways and means committee at Washington, is that debtor nations of Europe “may not reasonably be expected to continue heavy payments on their war debts over a period of 62 years.” That i.i about the time basis upon which Bri tain is repaying her debt to the United States and which America is under stood to desire shall be the period ovcj which, as a maximum, repayments bv her other large debtors shall extend Pushed for the last farthing, Dr. Adams declared, European nations ow ing vast sums of money to the Unitcii States will find some pretext of esca]iing payments, or the States will find n necessary to absolve them of their re maining obligations to that country “ I have not the slightest expectation or belief,” he said “that we shall continue to collect from our European deb tors annuities running into hundreds of millions of dollars for a. period of sixty-two years. I could not conceive of the United States, smilarly placed paying to some other nation 250,0000, 000 dollars a year.” Without pretend ing to express any opinion ns to the equity of the demand for full debt repayments, Dr. Adams said ho did no. believe America was justified, financially, in expecting that at the end of twenty years or so these huge payments will roll in from Europe on that war debt. “Over some years, in tho future,” he contended “in one wav or another, it will go. We shall Ideal with if, perhaps, as we did with the Boxer uprising indemnity. These debtor nations, however, are in Europe; they are linked together in the League of Nations, for the most part. They arc on another Continent. Wo are here

a rich people —a possible source of world wealth. One of two things seems inevitable. Some day the drain of these annual payments will tempt tho.se foreign nations to find some pretext for war against the United States, in course of which they will get rid oi their obligations. On the other hand, before that time the United States may discover some moans of voluntarilv re-

linquishing its claim.” The first alter native seems a desperate remedy for Europe to adopt, and the other will require a good deal of the “education ” in their relations with the rest of tho world of which Americans have shown themselves so slowly receptive.