Foreign News: Voyage Exploratory

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Article of Faith. The crowd at the station sang "Auld Lang Syne." The King-Emperor sent godspeed from Sandringham: ". . . [the voyage] is a contribution to those happy relations between two great peoples which must be an article of faith among all men of goodwill."

Wider Stage. At Geneva last month, in the epic speech of his career, Scot MacDonald cried: "Some of us—all of us— are still too heavily armed.'' Now he explained in his last message: "I do not . . . expect my stay in Washington to lead to spectacular developments . . . one reason for this is that the current negotiations for naval disarmament have been carried so far that they have now to be brought to the wider international stage." The next day President Hoover in the U. S. received for his approval a copy of Britain's invitation to Japan, Italy and France for the much-discussed Five-Power Naval Conference at London in January. President Hoover took occasion to correct the British version of his country's cruiser requirements, inserting "285,000 tons" instead of "315,000 tons," an erroneous figure which had somehow stuck in Mr. MacDonald's head.

In Tokyo, the Japanese Cabinet voted to accept the invitation before its arrival.

Paris, ever cautious, waited to make sure the MacDonald visit to Washington would not result in an English-speaking alliance.

The Party. Daughter Ishbel and her bags; Sir Robert Gilbert Vansittart, Principal Private Secretary, and his bags; Sydney Baron Arnold, leader of the Labor Party in Britain's upper house, and his bags; Rose Rosenberg, the Prime Minister's personal private secretary, and her bags; R. L. Craigie, head of the American Department of the Foreign Office, and his bags; Thomas Jones Esq., Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, onetime ironworks clerk, teacher, preacher, confidant of Prime Ministers since the War, and his bags—these with the Prime Minister were the Laborite fillings for the imperial suite and adjacent rooms on the Cunarder S. S. Berengaria, a suite prepared for possible use by Kaiser Wilhelm II, when the ship was built in 1912 as the Imperator, to be flagship of the Hamburg-America Line. To cross the ocean in this suite costs some $4,025 in the summer season, $2,875 in the winter. Other occupants have been the Prince of Wales, Gloria Swanson, Sanders A. Wertheim (coal), Samuel R. Rosoff (subways).

Departure. The MacDonalds found their quarters banked with flowers and white (lucky) heather. To two members of the family, younger son Malcolm and young daughter Sheila, they had said goodbye in London. The two others,* eldest son Alastair (architect) and young daughter Joan, passed the night on board while the Berengaria lay at the dock.

On sailing day, the Prime Minister and daughter Ishbel were on deck at 6:30 a. m., he in brown with white sport shoes, she buttoned up in a reindeer jacket. After breakfast they stood at the rail talking down to Alastair and Joan on the pier. Ishbel threw some pennies at Alastair, which he failed to catch in his hat.

Another sudden fog descended, delaying departure for two hours. When the ship did begin moving from the pier, a handsome, whitehaired Negro followed it, booming above the chorus of farewells something about a "mission for freedom."