"WORDS, WORDS, WORDS--"

At last the Senate can settle down to some interesting business. There is a new treaty to dissect, a new opportunity to bandy words the like of which has not been seen since 1918. "Does the Senator from Idaho?"--will be heard at frequent intervals if we are to judge from the opening debate. The Senate and the newspapers are apparently equally thrilled over the prospect of action once more, if what goes on in the Upper House at Washington can pass under that name; and the country would be thrilled too were it not for several facts.

The first of these is, of course, the talk-to-death performance of the Senate two years ago. Nobody wants to see the revival of such a performance; yet it looks as if the Senate's ability to filibuster were in no way diminished by a short vacation. The Four Power Treaty, simple, short and adequately expressed, is terrifying some gentlemen in Washington. What is this Treaty that raises such specters? To quote from Mr. Abbott's article printed yesterday in the CRIMSON, "By this treaty no new rights are created, and no rights are acknowledged which have not been acknowledged already. . . . It commits no nation under any condition to a policy of resistance." It is obviously a substitution for the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. The country will surely admit the necessity for a full and frank discussion of treaties, but, if the Senate balks much longer over this one, patience will cease to be a virtue.

More important than this fear of filibuster, however, is the question one cannot help asking: why all the excitement over the Four Power Treaty? If this agreement represents sensation, what shall we call those yet to come, those that touch on the real problems of the day--disarmament and the Chinese question? In spite of the fact that the Conference has been praised lavisly and hailed as a great success, its first real achievement is only the beginning of things. The worst of the petty quibbling in the United States Senate is not that it prevents the ratification of the Four Power Treaty--that is sin enough--but that it prevents any possibility of a really successful Conference.