The Prime Min ister said on Monday that the Hague Conference
had come to a deadlock and that the British delegates would probably return home this week. Less hopeful people have given up the Conference as a complete failure. Commander Hilton Young, the British delegate, put the case very clearly on Friday, July 14th, when he told Litvinoff that it was useless to ask Western investors to trust their money to the Bolsheviks without having any share in the management of the enterprises to which the money was to be applied. All this was perfectly obvious at the outset. Mr. Lloyd George and a few other optimists assumed that the Bolsheviks would not be so tactless as to ask for oredits without offering to recognize the ordinary rights of property. But the optimists were wrong. On Wednes- day Litvinoff admitted that he could not get credits without concessions. He promised, therefore, to ask his colleagues at Moscow whether they would acknowledge Russia's foreign loans and compensate foreign owners of confiscated Russian properties within the next two years. The Conference thus ends on a note of interrogation.
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