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As they drove up to Her Majesty's palace at The Hague, the delegates saw only a large, immaculate wooden house, with a severe square courtyard opening directly off a public street. The house was full of crisp, sweet-scented Dutch flowers, primly arranged in tall vases. There was drink to match the national taste of every guest: French champagne, German hock. British whisky, Italian lacrima christi, Japanese sake, also water and long black cigars from Dutch Sumatra.
Somehow or other the party became a marked success. There was no formal banquet table, no rigid order of precedence. Queen Wilhelmina had seen to that. She knew that Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Snowden would be outranked as a mere treasury official by the several prime ministers and foreign ministers present—and certainly Mr. Snowden would have been furious had he been seated below Prime Minister Eleutherios Venizelos of Greece! Therefore the delegates were seated not at one straight table but at ten round ones. Each statesman might fancy that where he sat was the head.
Too much credit should not be given to Her Majesty, but fact was that not many hours after the royal banquet Mr. Snowden, for the first time since the Conference opened, lunched informally with his chief foe, French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, and with Dr. Stresemann. As every U. S. businessman knows, the bigger the deal, the more vital is lunch.
Philip Snowden. Stubbornly battling for 100% fulfillment of his demands, pallid, drawn-faced, crippled Chancellor Snowden rejected, day after day. a long series of Franco-Belgian-Italian verbal offers, all claimed by the Latins to give Britain upwards of 80% satisfaction, all denounced by Mr. Snowden as giving less than 20%—a discrepancy accounted for by the fact that each side insisted on computing at different rates of interest the value of the sums involved over 59 years. "I have had the patience of a Job!" exclaimed the Chancellor to British correspondents. "I told this conference on the first day what Great Britain must have!"
Finally, after Queen Wilhelmina's banquet, Mr. Snowden asked that the latest verbal offer of the Latins be put in writing. All that afternoon, all night, all the next day, Prime Minister Aristide Briand of France and his Latin colleagues toiled to document their offer, snatching only occasional catnaps, trying desperately to get the job done in time to have a few days' leeway for final dickering before M. Briand would be obliged to leave for the September session "of the League of Nations at Geneva.
As ultimately presented the Latins' written offer gave Great Britain an increase of $6,500,000, annually in her share of what the creditor powers receive in reparations. Surprisingly enough the major part of this concession was made not by France but by Italy, a fact the more notable because the Italian chief delegate, Finance Minister Antonio Mosconi, has not had a free hand, but has been forced to keep in hourly telegraphic touch with Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, no softie.