TARDY COOPERATION

Admitting the present ineffectiveness of the League of Nations. Europe still seeks for itself a practical organization for the prevention of war, and at present the Pan-European Union is becoming the subject of considerable speculation. Geographically and commercially Europe is so closely bound that its lack of a congress for the treatment of international problems and for the propagation of deep rooted amity such as America possesses theoretically in the Pan American Union has dangerously inverted its national and economic consciousness. Again, it realizes the menace that Russia once stabilized will present with its deter, mined propagandist program for the conversion of all nations to communism, or the power that any of the great peoples of the world would have in event of war against the separate forces of Europe, bound by nationality and conflicting in interest.

The Pan-European Union originated at Locarno, has been fostered by France, and is warmly approved by Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. With Great Britain, and the Pan-American Union, it is intended that it form a trio of balanced powers of the white races. But it is not hard to see that it desires particularly to oppose a united and equal force to that of the United States. By Europe, the economic superiority that rested after the war on the complacent shoulders of this country is regarded not only with bitterness but with fear that through further vicissitudes Europe may become in its poverty completely subservient to the United States. For the prevention of such as eventuality, two courses are open, commercial rehabilitation with the relinquishment of custom barriers and trade competition, and more remotely and disastrously, war. And it is not least in the realization that the second possibility is often a reality when the economic balance is destroyed, that the Pan-American Union is felt necessary.