HIGH POLITICS

President Coolidge's proposal for further naval limitation to include cruisers and submarines as well as capital ships and aircraft carriers is statesmanlike not only for its spirit of cooperation with the League of Nations Disarmament Commission but also for its clever manipulation of a political situation which was as embarrassing to the Administration as it was dangerous to the heritage of the Washington Conference.

Since 1924 there have been many vague rumors emanating from the White House concerning such a conference to be held at Washington which should conclude the work begun by Mr. Hughes in 1921. That the at last forthcoming definite proposal should choose Geneva and the machinery of the League is significant of the changing attitude of official United States at last toward this instrument for peace which the mental abberation of a nation passed by in 1919. The time is not perhaps for distant when those "elder statesmen" in the Senate who exulted over the temporary delay to America's entry into the World Court because of the impossibility of acceptance by European powers of a reservation which would give to the United States rights not belonging to members of the League Council in the Court will be forced by the logic of events into understanding that "splendid isolation" is and always has been a myth in American history, that we are bound by the closest of political, economic, and social ties to Europe and her problems and that five days by water and two days by air are no more effective barriers to day than the Great Walls of China.

Further, the naval conference proposal will undoubtedly prove the card which will turn the trick in the Administration's struggle with House and Senate leaders over more cruisers. Speaker Longworth undoubtedly had the upper hand in regard to the facts of America's comparative naval competition. Mr. Coolidge with unusual dexterity has produced at exactly the psychological moment the more reasonable solution of limitation all round. The consternation yesterday of the paper patriots as reported in the metropolitan press was highly amusing. The manner in which they rushed to the support of the proposal and at the same time tried with much twisting and turning to have the cruisers augurs ill for this little attempt to ape the "Deutschland uber Alles" methods when it comes before the House again in the near future.

Mr. Coolidge's administration has not been particularly noted either for its vision in international affairs or its ability to lead or bully the houses of Congress into backing up its policies. It is perhaps for these reasons that the President's message and its political reactions, recalling as they do the great administrations of Roosevelt and Wilson, revive so strongly faith in the possibilities of American statesmanship.