National Affairs: Amendment by Rage

Last week the House of Representatives buckled down to work on the Hoover Moratorium. Behind it was a June promise to the President to ratify. Upon it were the anxious eyes of 15 debtor nations about to be relieved of paying the U. S. $246,000,000. Patriotism and prejudice, high motives and low manners marked its labors.

Because the War Debt agreements are not treaties but revenue laws of the U. S., the President's most able advocates of postponed collections marched not to the Senate but to the Ways & Means Committee of the House to make their best pleas. First to enter the ornate marble committeeroom was Ogden Livingston Mills, Undersecretary of the Treasury on whom the President leaned heavily during those troublous June days before France was jockeyed into line for the Moratorium. He told plump, mild-eyed Democratic Chairman James Collier and his 24 committee colleagues that Congress would be "everlastingly disgraced" if it failed to approve the agreement.

Secretary of State Stimson read the committee a long and rather dull statement detailing Germany's plight just before the Moratorium announcement. When the committee began a series of gentle questions, Statesman Stimson grew fussy and fidgety. "You can't send a sheriff overseas to collect the debt, you know," he snapped at one heckler. Henry Pomeroy Davison, youthful partner of J. P. Morgan & Co., was hastily summoned from New York to deny published reports that debtor nations had on deposit with his firm funds to make their Dec. 15 payments.

The best Administration argument advanced for the Moratorium was that by saving Germany from an economic and perhaps a political crash, it had preserved the U. S. from the financial consequences of such a downfall. Two points which were not effectively rebutted by White House spokesmen: 1) Europe, for all its alleged penury, has made no serious movement toward armament reduction; 2) every dollar postponed on the War Debts must be made up by a new tax dollar from U. S. citizens.

Never Again! The Ways & Means Committee was ready to give Mr. Hoover his Moratorium this time—but never again! Its members by a 16-to-9 vote tagged the resolution with this all-important amendment:

"It is hereby expressly declared to be against the policy of Congress that any of the indebtedness of foreign countries to the United States should be in any manner canceled or reduced and nothing in this joint resolution shall be construed as indicating a contrary policy, or as an implication to give favorable consideration at any time to a change in the policy hereby declared."