DEBTS MESSAGE

Taranaki Daily News, 4 June 1934, Page 5

DEBTS MESSAGE

PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS SACREDNESS OF OBLIGATION LEGISLATION INADVISABLE INDIVIDUAL CONFERENCES SACRIFICES MUST BE MADE By Telegraph—Press Assn.—Copyright. Rec. 7.20 p.m. Washington, June 2. “No legislation at this session of Congress is either necessary or advisable,” President Roosevelt declared in his war debts message to the United States Congress. “We are using every means to persuade each debtor nation of the sacredness of its obligation, and to assure each of our willingness, if it should so request, to discuss frankly and fully the special circumstances relating to the means and methods of payment.

“The American people is not disposed to place an impossible burden upon its debtors, but is nevertheless in a just position to ask that substantial sacrifices should be made to meet debts,” the message continued. “The repayment of debts has gravely complicated our trade and financial relationships with borrowing nations for many years.” The message also contained a warning that the American people were certain to be swayed “by the use which debtor countries will make of their available resources and whether they will be applied for the purpose of recovery as well as for a reasonable payment of the debt owed the United States, or for the purpose of unproductive nationalistic expenditure or like purposes.” There is generally little or no comment editorially on President Roosevelt’s war debts message, even such leading newspapers as the New York Times confining itself to the non -committal observation that “the message leave everything much as it was, President Roosevelt being unable to indicate a single step that might lead out of the muddle.” The World Telegram, however, speaking for the powerful Scripps Howard chain of 26 newspapers, to-day prints a very direct editorial article declaring that “war debts have value now only as trouble makers.” The article rather satirically observes: “It has been necessary for President Roosevelt to add to the words on war debts, which if laid end to end would carry the dispute to the farthest reaches of the stratosphere and dump it there where it belongs.” “The claims are good but they are not worth anything,” the leader adds. “It draws attention to America’s own broken pledge to pay gold and concludes that debts are worth nothing, even for disarmament bargaining, as intimated by the President’s message, since even the United States is embarked on a vast armament race.”