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Day later the President's plan for a whole series of Washington parleys preliminary to the World Conference fanned out into full view when Secretary Hull issued invitations for Italy's Mussolini, Germany's Hitler. Japan's Saito, China's Chiang Kaishek, Argentina's Justo, Brazil's Vargas, Chile's Alessandri, Canada's Bennett and Mexico's Rodriguez to journey to the U. S. If they could not go personally, they were urged to send personal representatives and. if that were not possible, to authorize their regular diplomatic representatives to speak for them. The only Grade A power not asked to Washington was Soviet Russia, still diplomatically unrecognized by the U. S. President Roosevelt's purpose was not a formal round-table conference in Washington as a prelude to the World Conference but a series of bilateral discussions with the idea of feeling out each power on possible trades to be clinched at London.
Debts Afterward. Such a mass movement on Washington as President Roosevelt invited represented a strategic triumph for his policy of subordinating the question of War Debts and keeping them outside the World Conference as a domestic issue to be settled separately between the U. S. and each debtor nation. When Secretary Hull moved into his office after March 4, the first international problem to be poked under his nose was Debts. Sir Ronald Lindsay began by asking what the U. S. proposed to do. Secretary Hull swung back in his big chair, thoughtfully fingered his corded eyeglasses, nodded his grey head and conceded that the Debts were indeed a question. But what about high tariffs, and gold, and unstable currency, and trade barriers? Diplomatically he steered the conversation around to these larger problems as matters to be solved first. Secretary Hull pointed out that the U. S. people were in no mood to forgive their debtors until their debtors were ready to grant a quid pro quo. Repeated was the familiar Hull view: "However important War Debts may be, they are not a major cause of the panic nor are they a major remedy."
Noteworthy was the fact that Debts went unmentioned in the Roosevelt-Mac-Donald exchange. The Prime Minister, of course, will discuss them with the President, once he reaches the White House, but they will be kept on a secondary level. Likewise President Roosevelt shrewdly diffused the debt issue by calling to Washington eleven powers of which only three owe the U. S. money on the War. Adroit, too, was his suggestion that M. Herriot represent France because that French statesman was the most dogged advocate of paying the U. S. the $19,200,000 owing since Dec. 15.