462.00R296/2852: Telegram
The Secretary of State to the Chargé in France (Armour)
133. For Mr. Young. I thank you for your message of April 19th. I have studied it carefully and have discussed it with the President and Mr. Mellon. We feel that there is little to add to my message of April 15th. I want to be sure, however, that you understand that this message was in no sense an instruction. I fully realize that your Committee is in no way responsible to the Governments whose nationals are represented thereon and I did not intend that you should transmit my message, either formally or informally, to your colleagues. [Page 1066] It was sent, as I said then, in order that you might understand how the Allied proposals had impressed this Government and also to permit you to correct unwarranted conclusions or misunderstandings on our part. For the same reason, I do not wish to formulate a statement of the position of this Government for transmission to the Committee, either by you or by Wilson.
I think the misunderstanding, in so far as there was any, is due to the fact that we considered the task of the Experts Committee as similar to that of the Dawes Committee in that it was again to determine, in the light of later information, Germany’s capacity to pay. It was to go further in that it had “the task of drawing up proposals for the complete and final settlement of the reparation problem”, which meant not only a recommendation as to annual payments but the term in which these payments were to conclude Germany’s obligation. It seemed to us, therefore, when your telegrams indicated that Allied needs rather than German capacity to pay played a preponderating part in the discussions, that there had thus been introduced what was essentially a political element which was absent in the negotiations leading to the formulation of the Dawes Plan.
I wonder, therefore, if the work of the Committee should be resumed, whether it might not still be possible to attack the problem from a purely economic point of view. To be strictly within the province of expert economists and financiers who are not responsible to their Governments, it seems to us that negotiations should be confined to an attempt to reconcile the payments which the Germans consider themselves able to make to the payments which the Allied experts, through their study of German capacity, believe the Germans able to pay. This method would avoid, it seems to us, the introduction of political questions with which your Committee should not be called on to deal and, from our point of view, would prevent any apparent correspondence between German payments and Allied out-payments, two matters which, as I explained to you before, we do not consider economically related. Questions of this nature might properly have been taken into consideration by the different governments after receiving the report of the Experts.
I am not now sending you the above in any spirit of criticism because I do not know the conditions under which you have been working. Like my message of April 15th, this telegram is intended merely to assist you in understanding our attitude. Again it is not for transmission to your colleagues who should not even know of its receipt from us. If the resumption of negotiations is possible, we shall earnestly hope for success and shall consider the final report of the Committee of Experts in the most sympathetic spirit.