America and France A new element was introduced into the
debt controversy by the observations Mr. Hoover allowed it to be known he had made in Washington a week ago. The main purport of it all was to clear the President of the charge of having associated the reparations and debts issues in his conversations with M. Laval in October, 1931, or implied that the moratorium on debts would continue till a general settlement by agreement was reached. The question is of no very real importance in view of Mr. Hoover's imminent disappearance from active politics, but nothing damns a politician in America to-day so much as a suspicion of playing France's game, and the retiring President no doubt sees no reason for accepting any undeserved reproach on that score. But his reminder that he dwelt, in his talk with M. Laval, on the question of capacity to pay, at a moment when some hundreds of millions of French gold lay in the vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank, has been received a little uneasily in France. The moral for ourselves is that we should push ahead with our own negotiations at Washington on our account, not as one of many figures in a " united front," as soon as there is someone effective at Washingfon to negotiate with. The new Hoover-Roosevelt talk sug- gests that that may be sooner than seemed likely.
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