To the Government of Her Majesty Queen Wilhelmina the sum of more than half a million florins ($220,000) was left by Her Majesty's loyal subject Banker Johan Gerard Daniel Waterler with two stipulations:
1) If the Royal Government "should not find itself in a suitable position" to award the income from this money each year as a Peace Prize it should entrust the task to the Dutch-appointed directorate of the Palace of Peace (Carnegie Peace Foundation) at The Hague.
2) No matter who should make the award, every other Waterler Peace Prize must go to a Dutchman.
Prize-Giver Waterler died July 22. 1927. The Royal Government took its time, finally placed determination of the award in the hands of the Carnegie Endowment which also took its time. But last week the first Waterler Peace Prize ($10.000) finally got itself awarded.
Winner: a drab-appearing Englishman who not only works for peace but toils for it 365 days every year: Sir Eric Drummond, secretary general of the League of Nations.
To quiet any possible Dutch resentment at this worthy choice, a spokesman for the Palace of Peace directors pointed out that Banker Waterler did not stipulate that his series of peace prizes must begin with a Dutchman.
Perhaps on the theory that only three kinds of Dutch stories are news (bursting dikes, sly yarns of the fat Prince Consort, heartthrobs about Crown Princess Juliana), 99% of the U. S. Press and all three major U. S. news services made no mention whatever last week of the Waterler Peace Prize. It was reported to the foreign-news-conscious New York Herald Tribune by dutiful Correspondent Herbert Antcliffe.