NEWS OF THE WEEK
THE French memorandum on disarmament pre- cipitates no such crisis as some of the daily papers in this country have manufactured out of it. It is a very unsatisfactory document none the less, comparing unfavourably with the note addressed by Germany to His Majesty's Government only twenty-four hours earlier. (The French, it must be assumed, had not seen this document when they drafted their own.) The essence of the situation is clear. France acts and negotiates on the assumption that Germany should continue to observe scrupulously the disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles till a disarmament convention is drafted to take their place, no matter how many more years that process may take. It has taken seven so far. There is no prospect whatever that Germany will do that, and public opinion in this country will pass no severe judgement on her, particularly after the equality-of-status agreement of December, 1932, for declining to accept indefinitely a position of inferiority that was intended from the first to be only temporary. The French, though they pride themselves on their sense of reality, have in their last memorandum lost touch with reality completely. The only reality is the imperative necessity of achieving some form of disarmament by agreement. France declares agreement to be unattainable and throws the onus on Germany. * *
