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The Fiscal Side provides that the Young Plan shall supersede the Dawes Plan on Nov. 1, 1929. The Dawes Plan fixed only the maximum amount which Germany might be called upon to pay in any one year, but left unspecified the number of years over which the Allies could collect. That is to say, the Dawes Plan did not fix the total Reparations debt of Germany. The Young Plan was drafted last Spring in Paris (TIME, Feb. 18, et seq.): 1) to fix the total German Reparations debt at a present cash value of some nine billion dollars, payable over 58 years; 2) to provide for the selling of bonds on the world market secured by Germany's promise to pay these Reparations, the proceeds from selling the bonds to go at once as a cash payment to Creditor Powers. Adoption of the Young Plan at The Hague last week-subject of course to ratification by the Parliaments of the Powers concerned-means that Germans now know for the first time how much it cost them to lose the War, and that U. S. citizens will soon have the privilege of buying prodigious blocks of German Reparations bonds.
The Political Side of the settlement pledges France, Britain and Belgium to withdraw the last of their troops from the occupied German Rhineland not later than June 30, 1930. This is the major concession for which Foreign Minister Dr. Gustav Stresemann has been battling for six years. Had he gone home to Berlin last week without it, the Cabinet of Chancellor Hermann Müller (a sloppily-dressed, insignificant Socialist utterly dwarfed by Dr. Stresemann) would certainly have fallen. Today beaming, sentimental Germans know for the first time since the War the exact date on which they will be again sole masters of their beloved, storied Rhine.
Sponge Cake Victory. Neither of these two great international achievements-ratification of the Young Plan and provision for evacuating the Rhineland-had very much to do with the essentially national and British victory which Mr. Snowden scored in getting his bigger slice of sponge cake. Immensely popular in Britain, the "sponge cake victory" assumed world importance only because the stubborn Yorkshireman was able to block the conference from achieving its great ends until he got what he wanted.