TWO VIEWS OF UNCLE SAM.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 226, 24 September 1929, Page 6

TWO VIEWS OF UNCLE SAM.

I What a sweet, tmsophisticated, gullible old party Uncle Sam must be after all (says the "Christian Science Monitor"). True, he does not seem to be so regarded by foreign observers of his ways and deeds. Indeed, some of them call him "Uncle Shylock," and attribute to him the cunning of a fox in the acquisition of what he wants. The cartoonists of foreign newspapers bestow upon him a countenance fitted only to glare over a pawnbroker's counter, or through the bars of a cell. If his nature' is to be assessed by the estimates of European observers he must be classed as ,a sort of compound of Machiavelli, Shylock, Napoleon, Captain Kidd and Uriah Heep —at once the slickest of diplomatists, the most unrelenting of creditors, the most aggressive imperialist, the hungriest buccaneer and the oiliest of hypocrites. That anybody could overreach him in a deal, or outwit him in a controversy, is a thing unthinkable to European observers.

But how different the estimate put on Uncle Samuel by his own boys at home! Always they find him getting duped and betrayed by the keener political intellects of; foreigners. Will one ever'hear the last of poor Mr. Wilson's naive innocence and his betrayal by those pundits of diplomatic skill, Lloyd George and Clemenceau? Is not the United States out of the League of Nations largely because timid folks thought America's delegates would be the mere cat'spaws of giant intellects from Bulgaria or Czechoslovakia, and is it! not besought to stay out of the World Court lest such an innocent.as Charles E. Hughes be outwitted by its keener members? Constantly one hears the assertion that American diplomacy is no match for the perfected European variety—a theory the modesty of which is not affected when Europeans point out that, whatever the quality of its representatives, the United States usually carries away the spoils, if there are any, in an international conference.

• Just now Williamstown is resounding with these "manifestations of an American inferiority complex. Admiral Rodgers sees the Presidents of the United States, past and future, as the dupes, victims, suckers, pigeons, gulls, puppets and Simple Simons of international controversies. Were there other synonyms in the thesaurus doubtless the admiral would employ them. He visions the Washington Naval Conference as "instigated by British propagandists." President Harding, who called it; President Coolidge, who welcomed it, and former Secretary Hughes, who dominated it, were but as clay in the hands of the British potters. And ever since, the British gold which in the old days was supposed to be dispensed lavishly to defeat America's tariff bills and British propaganda are being employed to keep the American navy in a state of hopeless inferiority. "Ain't it awful?"