Whoever goes to Berlin must tread delicately, for his task
will be to urge- Germany to accept not merely the Air Pact which she approves, but other of the London proposals regarding which she shows so far less enthusiasm. She has adduced no good grounds for declining to sign the Eastern European Pact, and the conclusion of that agree- ment would, as the Russian Ambassador in London pointed out on Tuesday, materially increase confidence throughout Eastern Europe—a fact on which Poland no less than Germany might with profit reflect. That is a consideration which British Ministers are entitled to emphasize at Berlin, but Britain at any rate need not go so far as to make the Air Convention dependent on the Eastern European Pact. For the Air Convention is a logical supplement to the Loearno agreements and has unquestionable value in itself. It is earnestly to be hoped that the larger objectives of the recent London Conference will be achieved, but there would be no sense in taking the line that it must be absolutely all or nothing. We do not fully endorse General Spears' assumption, in his interesting article on a later page, that the Air Pact is directed against Germany—Locarno, to which it gives logical effect, was not—but he is entirely right in urging that the chief essential is to make the collective system of the League of Nations" effective, with regional pacts supplementary to it.
