officer and two others. In the subsequent fighting there were a few other British casualties, but the mutiny was soon and without difficulty suppressed and order restored.

The Zaghloulists did not take their ejection from office with a good grace and seemed determined to create difficulties for their successors. In particular the legality of the arrest of deputies was contested. The convoking of Parliament in which the Zaghloulists had a large majority was also demanded. This Parliament, however, never met again for it was dissolved in the last days of the year.

Although the relations between Britain and Egypt occupied the centre and the greater part of the stage of Egyptian history during the past year it did not monopolise that stage. Not distant from the major question was that of the contribution of the Egyptian Government towards the cost of the Army of Occupation and also the payment of the Turkish Tribute. The former item has appeared in the Egyptian Budget since the British occupation over forty years ago. The amount has varied, but it has for long stood at £E. 146,000 which is less than the present cost of the Army to the British Exchequer. In June the Egyptian Government ceased payment of this amount. The Turkish Tribute paid by Egypt for a long period in virtue of her dependence on the Ottoman Sultans, was made the security for two of the Turkish loans. The view held by the Egyptians is that the liability for this tribute ended when Egypt ceased to be a tributary of Turkey. The Egyptian Government suggested a Conference of the Powers interested to consider the situation or alternatively reference of the matter to the International Court of Justice at The Hague.

Some trouble also arose with the Italian Government over the Egypto-Italian frontier. The dispute was the result of a promise made to Italy by England as an inducement to enter the recent war to the effect that she should have an extension of territory on the east of Tripoli. Italy claimed that it was for Egypt to carry out this undertaking, but Egypt did not appear to share this view. Early in the year the Egyptian Government declined to hand over to Italy ten Tripolitan Nationalist leaders, whom the Italian Government claimed as Italian subjects, partly because it did not admit their nationality and partly because it held them to be political refugees.

Throughout the greater part of the year there was sporadic Communist trouble. Early in the year industrial troubles in Alexandria led in several instances to the seizure of factories by the workmen. In the meanwhile a Communist Party came formally into being, and the Government retorted with searches, arrests, and deportations.

CHAPTER X.

AMERICA: THE UNITED STATES-CANADA-ARGENTINA-BRAZIL -CHILE-MEXICO-OTHER COUNTRIES.

THE UNITED STATES.

NOTHING could be simpler than the pattern of 1924 in the United States.

In foreign affairs the country moved with a kind of careless boldness to the Left. By identifying itself during the year with the so-called "Dawes plan" for the solution of the reparation question, it involved itself cheerfully in that very "entangling alliance" with the Old World against which it had fought since the Armistice. Even on the vexed question of the de facto recognition of Soviet Russia, it moved toward the Left, the close of the year finding that useful person, "the administration. spokesman," freely admitting that President Coolidge, despite the long opposition of Secretary Hughes, was inclined to yield to the Senate demand for a commission to investigate the issues in dispute between the United States and the new régime in Russia.

But on every sort of domestic issue, the country moved impressively toward the Right. This was largely due to the threat of a business slump which hung over the country for the first quarter of the year; as soon as business conditions improved, the relief was so general that at the November presidential and congressional elections, the Republicans were overwhelmingly elected on a colourless platform by promising to do nothing whatever to disturb the new and revived prosperity. The ten days following this Republican victory found Wall Street engaged in an enormous "bull" campaign during which period the phenomenal total of 18,717,732 shares were dealt with on the Stock Exchange-a reflection of the belief that "the country (meaning the interests of the business and professional classes) was safe with President Coolidge." This number of shares broke all records on the New York Stock Exchange save for the panic weeks ending May 4 and May 11, 1901.

Throughout the year the two tendencies here describedthe one in foreign affairs and the conservative movement in domestic affairs-remained in completely water-tight compartments; it would be extremely difficult to show that either had had the slightest effect upon the other.

According to the official estimates of the United States Department of Commerce, American loans abroad had reached by the close of 1923 the somewhat impressive total of eight billion dollars (8,000,000,000 dollars), of which two and a half billions were in Government securities and five and a half billions in

T

industrial securities. This tendency of American capital to flow abroad for investment continued through the year 1924 when, according to the Department of Commerce, an additional billion dollars was loaned out of the country, making a total of nine billions. Though nominally coming from New York, these loans as a matter of fact were widely distributed throughout the country; there was scarcely a community of any size from coast to coast whose local banks had not invested part of the community's savings in one or more of these loans. Although the local politicians continued to repeat the old maxims about keeping away from Europe, the business class in general found itself committed, willy-nilly, to some scheme or other for the settlement of Europe's post-war problems.

That is why there were no murmurs when Mr. Charles G. Dawes of Chicago and Mr. Owen D. Young of Boston, acting as private citizens, accepted the invitation of the Reparations Commission to serve on a committee appointed to review Germany's capacity to pay reparations and to draft some plan by which she could do it. On January 14 in Paris, General Dawes and Mr. Reginald McKenna opened the sessions of the committees of experts summoned to study the problem of reparations; on January 29 the Dawes Commission reached Berlin and took evidence, and on April 9 the two committees submitted to the Reparations Commission in Paris their elaborate and highly technical reports.

Deep interest was excited in both North and South America by the recommendations of the two committees. Many newspapers on both continents received the complete text by cable and printed it in full: so deeply interested was South America in the two reports that La Prensa of Buenos Aires, receiving the text partly in English and partly in French, translated it into Spanish and printed them in full on the morning of the day they were issued in Paris. Of course the feeling behind all this was the conviction that somehow or other the corner had been turned in the long, harassing post-war struggle; as soon as the Reparations Commission accepted the reports on April 17 -thus removing the last doubts as to the possibility of a settlement-stock markets everywhere reflected in their buoyant tendency the conviction that at last things were on the mend.

In the United States the overwhelming feeling was one of pride in the fact that it was a commission headed by an American which had solved the problems after the Premiers and Finance Ministers of Europe had repeatedly failed. So wide

1 Among the more important loans of the year should be noted the following:110,000,000 dollars to Germany; credits of 100,000,000 dollars to France to protect the franc; 150,000,000 dollars to Japan, unquestionably a steadying factor in the relations between the United States and Japan; 65,300,000 dollars to Canadian Railways; 29,000,000 dollars in Canadian Provincial and Municipal Loans; 37,000,000 dollars in Japanese industrials; 50,000,000 dollars to Mexico; 45,000,000 dollars to French railways; 40,000,000 dollars to Holland; 30,000,000 dollars to Switzerland; and 20,000,000 dollars to Argentine.

spread was this feeling that the Republicans, in their national convention in Cleveland on June 12, conscripted Mr. Dawes as their candidate for vice-president with Mr. Coolidge for president; the overwhelming victory of Coolidge and Dawes at the presidential election on November 4 was widely attributed to the popular strength which Mr. Dawes as "the man who solved the reparations question" brought to the Republican ticket. Incidentally, it should be noted that the American portion of the loan to Germany, provided in the Dawes plan and amounting to 110,000,000 dollars, was over-subscribed on October 14 in New York in fifteen minutes.

But neither President Coolidge nor Secretary_of_State Hughes was very much "in the picture" so far as the Dawes report was concerned. There is not much doubt that through Ambassador Kellogg they were both in close touch with the London Conference which initialled the Dawes report on August 16, but they kept up with remarkable success the American rôle of official detachment from the affairs of Europe.

However, this detachment did not prevent them from laying down in Paris on November 26 a new and very different policy. On that date and at that place there was a conference of allied financial experts to draw up, for the Finance Ministers of the Allied countries, a scheme for the distribution of the reparation payments to be secured from Germany under the Dawes plan. At that conference, Colonel A. J. Logan presented claims on behalf of the United States for the payment out of reparations of the cost of the American army of occupation in Germany and of the material losses suffered by American nationals throughout the war.

There was instantly the most strenuous opposition to the American claims. Great Britain, in particular, protested against the claims on the broad grounds that the United States, having signed a separate treaty with Germany, had no title to reparations flowing from the treaty signed by the other Allies with Germany. American public opinion was curiously indifferent to the dispute, but the Administration stood its ground at Paris and finally secured a settlement in substantial accord with the American claims, though the payments, it was agreed, should be spread over a very considerable period of years.

In short, it may be said that with her foreign policy more or less the football of domestic politics, the United States again contrived in 1924, as in each year since the Armistice, to carry water on both shoulders, to be in Europe and not in Europe at one and the same time. Driven by her investments as well as by her characteristic idealism to take a hand in the European difficulty, she yet contrived to strike an attitude of aloofness from time to time to satisfy those domestic critics who saw in Europe nothing but a snare.

Mr. Coolidge himself followed somewhat tepidly the policy

cautiously laid down by his predecessor and former chief, President Harding.

That is to say, in occasional speeches throughout the year 1924, he announced his intention of calling a second Washington Conference to discuss those secondary aspects of naval disarmament judiciously omitted from the first Washington Conference; he also declared his belief that the United States should subscribe, with certain reservations, to The Hague International Tribunal, and on December 9 announced through the State Department that the United States would participate in a conference to be called by the League of Nations in April or May, 1925, to consider the restriction of international trade in arms and munitions of war. In all these matters, he was certainly well in touch with American public opinion.

Throughout the year the Administration was more or less at loggerheads with Congress. In fact, it sustained several severe defeats on important domestic legislation-any one of which would have brought down a European Premier-and even on one important foreign issue the President had to bite the dust. That issue was the question whether or not Congress, in drafting a Bill for the restriction of immigration, should insert a clause specifically excluding the Japanese and, by the same token, abrogating the famous "gentlemen's agreement" signed by President Roosevelt and the Japanese Ambassador, an agreement which the Administration insisted had been scrupulously kept by Japan.

It is just barely possible that the Administration might have prevented the insertion of this anti-Japanese clause except for an unfortunate diplomatic contretemps. Learning that the House Immigration Committee was planning to insert in the pending Immigration Restriction Bill a clause specifically barring the Japanese, Ambassador Hanihara wrote to Secretary Hughes intimating that "grave consequences" to the relations between Japan and the United States would follow such a summary abandonment of the "gentlemen's agreement." Secretary Hughes made public the letter-approvingly-but was more or less dumbfounded when the anti-Japanese politicians seized upon the reference to "grave consequences" as a sinister threat. In vain did the Japanese Ambassador explain that no threat was intended. The House of Representatives, in an outburst of chauvinism, passed the Immigration Bill on April 12, by 322 to 71, and the Senate, without a dissenting vote or even the formality of a roll call, adopted Senator Reed's amendment to the Immigration Bill barring from the United States any Japanese "except ministers, members of the learned professions and the arts, students, and their wives and children." The two Houses finally agreed on a common Bill, with a provision excluding the Japanese, which was passed by both Houses on May 15 and reluctantly signed by President Coolidge on May 26, but not before Ambassador Cyrus E. Woods at Tokyo