Holiday

The most recent plan for snagging the world out of the economic morass is the product of the mind of Chicagoan Solomon Levinson, who is reputed to have suggested the term and the idea of a moratorium to President Hoover. The Levinson plan seeks to counteract the French theory of the unity of war debts and reparations by establishing a relationship between war debt reparations and disarmament. It postulates a four year armament holiday.

Briefly, it seeks to urge another $1,250,000,000 from the unwilling pockets of all this country's Allied debtors in four yearly installments of $312,000,000 each. This clause is plainly designed to pacify in advance derisive jingoes who intend to demand each last, least dollar of payment. The second clause of the plan is the most important:

"... Nations, including our own, shall enter into a binding agreement for a general holiday in all armament construction for the next four years, so as to assure the desired relief through the period of the present depression. Such a holiday would save the American budget $350,000,000 a year, which, for four years would be $1,400,000,000."

The beneficial effect of this armament moratorium would be far greater than the mere saving implied by the annual budget deduction it would make possible. It extends beyond even the stimulus to trade which would result from having our Allied debtors forgive their debtors as we forgive them, and wiping the whole complicated web of inter-governmental obligations starkly from the slate. It would reach even beyond re-establishing the self curative factors which Sir Arthur Salter attests to be the property of all healthy depressions, and which were bound and buried by the enormous extensions of private credit and the contraction of trade which were the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles. The great thing would be the precedent for disarmament and for peace which an arms moratorium would establish.

Peace has never had the proper kind of publicity. It hasn't lent itself to the copy-starved portables of reporters with the same excitement which war can marshal. It is essentially a tranquil, home-loving, field and stream, house and garden sort of condition. It has never had such valuable props in its kit as patriotism, heroism, bright ribbony medals, brass bands, and the devoted support of the ladies.

At the same time, the real and unseverable connection between Peace and the Pocketbook has never been clearly understood. War has always been immediately profitable: prices and wages have risen, steel, the barometer of business, has always skyrocketed, leather, sugar, munitions, staples have always been in demand, farmers have been able to pay off the old mortgage. The depression thereafter for which the nation has had to pay with far more misery and death than for War itself is not connected with it in the popular mind.

The dramatic effect of an arms moratorium, and the balm with which it would poultice the public purse would in themselves be the greatest Peace publicity since Edward Bok. It is the kind of holiday which the world is aching to take and on which those potent governesses of government: the steel and arms cartels, are loath to let the world go. But because the plan smacks of idealism, and because also the adroit diplomacy of our Allied debtors would never permit a connection between their arms and their obligations, it seems destined never to get much farther than the third pages of liberal newspapers and the minds of a few liberal men. The Dartmouth.