Disarmament : the Latest Check The Disarmament Conference, with which
nothing can go well, has been thrown into new confusion by the Germans. Of the seventeen amendments to the British plan standing in their name some are reasonable enough, some plausible but impracticable, and others plainly inconsistent with either the spirit or the letter of the convention before the Conference. The thesis that all States must abandon the offensive weapons which Ger- many has been compelled to abandon, and that Germany must be allowed all the weapons which other States retain on the ground that they are defensive, can at least be discussed ; but when the German delegation on the one hand goes back to the old question of trained reserves, proposing to include them (on a defined basis) among a country's effectives, and on the other rejects completely the British proposal for the standardization of European armies, a completely impossible situation is created. Whether the present German Government wants the Disarmament Conference to succeed or fail there is no means of knowing. The inference is that it hopes for failure and aims at securing this by a strategy designed, under the cover of superficially' attractive proposals, to make _agreement impossible. Thus the Germans idvocate the abolition of military aviation, but denounce the internationalization of civil aviation without which it never will be abollshed. Germany entirely isolated at Geneva, but Herr Nadolny seems to have had instructions from Berlin to-yield at-no point, though a compromise has in fact been reached regarding armed police.
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