Education: Frothy Utterances

On and on and on went the Williamstown Institute of International Politics (TIME, July 28 et seq.)

¶To start the third week, the Experts' Plan for Germany's restoration was lugged into Chapin Hall. The members hunched forward in their seats to hear what Dr. Moritz J. Bonn, financial oracle to many a Berlin ministry, would say.

Dr. Bonn approved, with minor reservations; said the Plan had removed one or two of the larger flies from the Versailles Treaty ointment. Sir James Arthur Salter, chief of the League's financial section, in his turn likened the Experts' job of work to the bridging of many gulfs. John H. Fahey, a major fixture in the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, skimmed over the high points of a world trade revival that he and other business men had envisioned springing all golden from the Experts' foreheads.

¶ Dr. Harry A. Garfield, host of all present, introduced Yusuke Tsurumi, young Japanese Liberal: "There is every reason to evidence to every Japanese within our portals that the Congress of the United States sometimes makes mistakes."

Said Yusuke, every inch the diplomat: "The recent Immigration Bill . . . has had and will continue to have 'grave consequences.' . . . To grow angry about it is like growing angry at storms and earthquakes. . . . America and Japan, on the opposite shores of a vast ocean, stand now upon the threshold of a new era—the Pacific era."

¶Dr. Leo S. Rowe, Pan-Americanist, suggested the League as a counterbalance, if not a substitute, for the Doctrine of James Monroe.

¶General Henry T. Allen, famed Ruhr occupant for the U. S., fanned up some academic excitement by revealing that the Washington Conference on Limitation of Armaments (1920) almost initiated an association of nations. General Allen was demonstrating that the World Court idea was "the legitimate child of a Republican father and a Democratic mother," neither of whom should contemplate infanticide.

¶And so to Exhibit B of the week. Sir Arthur Salter's round table had been pouring over the League of Nations for days. There had been dissension. Now the debate was brought out into Chapin Hall, where the Army and Business (pro) locked epithets with the Navy and miscellaneous interests (con). Rear Admiral John A. Rodgers, outspoken mariner, "shocked" a Britisher, was hissed by a woman. The tumult over, Sir Arthur obliged by answering League questions, dubbing the U. S. "Arcadia," to keep his remarks free from improprieties.

¶Said the Boston Transcript, irritably: "A marvelous testimony to American good nature and American patience is the Williamstown Institute of Politics . . . frothy utterances . . . foreign meddling during a Presidential campaign."