NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE bankers have brought the London Conference down to earth with a bump. All the airy and vague optimism, all the elaborately created atmosphere of good will has been shattered, as we predicted it would be, by the first touch of reality. It came about is follows. The Conference appointed three CoMmittees, each to work on one aspect of the problem of applying the Dawes Report. Among the tasks of the first Com- mittee was to decide on what constituted a flagrant and wilful default by Germany, and to select S. body to decide whether such default had, in fact, taken place. It was known that the French and English views on this subject were divergent, and that Mr. MacDonald had had to modify his original hypothesis that it was to be some body " other than the Reparations Commission," in order to satisfy M. Herriot. The first Committee, however, did not find great difficulty. They soon agreed that it should be, after all, the Reparations Com- mission which should decide on whether Germany had defaulted, but that the Commission should be strengthened by the addition of an American citizen. Everyone seemed happy.
