SECRET DIPLOMACY REVIVED AT ITALIAN YACHT CONFERENCE
The Evening Star's front page for October 2, 1926 set Washington's stalled World Court debate beside violence at home and intrigue in Europe. David Lawrence reported that President Coolidge treated the Geneva powers' response to the Senate's reservations as a rejection and would informally ask senators what they wished to change; Lawrence wrote that it was a foregone conclusion they would refuse to reopen the question. An Associated Press dispatch from Groton, Massachusetts, described about 100 anti-Klan attackers in automobiles barricading a road with felled trees and firing on some 400 Klansmen at a field meeting; more than 100 shots were fired but no casualties were reported. John Gunther, cabling from London, gave the official British account of the Chamberlain–Mussolini meeting aboard a yacht at Leghorn, then relayed observers' belief that it marked a return of secret diplomacy and balance-of-power politics answering the Franco-German rapprochement.
FLORIDA OFFICIALS HINDER RED CROSS WORK PAYNE CLAIMS
ARMY TAKES STEPS TO REDUCE FORCE AND AVOID DEFICIT
The Advertiser's front page of October 2, 1926 carried a home-grown effort to answer the cotton slump. The Alabama Farm Bureau Federation and the Montgomery Chamber of Commerce sought to merge several proposed cotton-state meetings into one conference at Montgomery, immediately after a regional agricultural conference ending on October 12, and Farm Bureau president Edward A. O'Neal wired Secretaries Jardine and Hoover to join in. An AP dispatch from Washington reported Red Cross chairman John Barton Payne's charge that Florida officials and real estate men had "practically destroyed" the hurricane relief drive by belittling the damage; amid the dispute, Richmond's mayor held up a $10,000 check. A second AP report said the War Department had stopped recruiting to cut nearly 8,000 enlisted men and avoid a deficit, even as President Coolidge promised no material reduction in defense appropriations.
This London, Ontario, evening paper of October 2, 1926 carried a Quebec dispatch on the arrival of the new governor-general, Lord Willingdon, and Lady Willingdon. It described a mist-shrouded procession of scarlet uniforms from Lower Town to the Parliament Buildings, where he was installed at noon, and cast Canada as both heir to two peoples' traditions and part of a great empire. Local news covered the Bell Telephone Company's midnight cut-over to the new Fairmont exchange, which would put 15,820 numbers onto the new exchange and replace the old brown directory with a blue one. A third story gave a local coal dealer's view that the cancelled $7-a-ton Alberta coal trainloads promised by R. B. Bennett had failed over railway freight rates, not politics.
The Vossische Zeitung of 2 October 1926 took up the aftermath of the Germersheim shooting. It reported that Richard Holzmann, a shoemaker wounded that Sunday night, had been summoned from hospital as a witness by the French military court in Landau and then declared under arrest when he denied striking the officer. The paper protested that the lieutenant who had fired, by contrast, was merely confined to a Landau hotel and had been seen walking the streets alone. Emil Ludwig, on his way to the Paneuropa Congress in Vienna, argued that a union of Europe's 25 states could only be a union of republics and warned against Bismarck's ghost. A Bucharest report quoted the Romanian minister Mitilineu, who hailed Germany's entry into the League of Nations as historic and predicted a settlement of the Banca Generale notes.
Le Figaro's front page of 2 October 1926 set foreign-policy polemic beside domestic finance. An editorial signed "Intérim." seized on a Times article arguing that any revision of the inter-Allied debt settlements would have to come from Washington, and that Europe could never pay its debts or reparations while American financial policy and protectionist tariffs stood. A "Foreign Affairs" note accused nationalist German papers such as the Lokal Anzeiger of exploiting incidents at Germersheim, Trier and Koblenz to wreck rapprochement just after Germany's admission at Geneva, and promised that an inter-Allied inquiry would set the record straight. Henri Vonoven's political column greeted the education reorganization as the last step of the economies authorized by the law of 3 August, blamed the Cartel for years of delay, and called for reform of parliamentary habits and even constitutional rules.
This Vienna edition gave generous space to the idea of European economic unity. In a signed column, Siegfried Strakosch argued that Paneuropa had to begin with economic cooperation among its peoples, but warned that abolishing tariffs would ruin industries artificially protected in the wrong places and threaten jobs, even under the gradual reduction suggested by the Austrian envoy Riedl. He noted a reported Yugoslav plan for a Balkan customs union, judged it easier in less industrialized states, and proposed instead bringing governments and industries to the negotiating table, as the new iron pact had done. A glowing portrait hailed Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi as a pure and creative leader, grounding his standing in his father, a Habsburg diplomat in Tokyo who wrote a philosemitic book on antisemitism and married a Japanese woman. A notice listed expert contributions, including pieces by Elemér Hantos, Georg Gothein and Gustav Gratz, for a Central European Transport Conference in Vienna from 2 to 5 October.
This Algiers daily carried Paris news of a council of ministers at the Élysée where Poincaré, as finance minister, presented economy decrees under the Law of August 3, 1926, abolishing 92 mortgage registries and another 1,700 posts in the finance administration, while Herriot's decrees gave Sèvres, the Gobelins, Beauvais and other institutions legal personality and financial autonomy. From Germersheim, the page relayed the Wolff Agency's account of the German victim's funeral, the orderly departure of the French 311th Artillery and a French report calling the attack on Lieutenant Rouzier premeditated. A press review quoted Le Temps insisting that the Chamberlain–Mussolini talk at Livorno was no counterweight to the Briand–Stresemann meeting at Thoiry, then opened L'Humanité's charge that British imperialism was backing Italian ambitions.
This Madagascar paper looked at French politics as Parliament prepared to return. A column signed L. L. recalled the fall of Herriot's short-lived cabinet and Poincaré's national-union ministry, which ended a run of six cabinet crises. It noted Poincaré's hold over a broad majority but predicted early trouble over ratifying the London and Washington war-debt agreements. The paper also printed legal text on cheques: a holder's options when the drawer's funds fell short, fines of 500 to 10,000 francs for drawees who misstated the funds, and a narrow list of grounds on which a drawer could stop payment. A long hygiene article on Tananarive condemned household cesspits and 'Malagasy pits', made the municipality responsible for collective sewerage, and called for an all-to-the-sewer system.
This page of L'Écho annamite for 2 October 1926 carried the campaign letter of Bui Quang Chieu, the Constitutionalist leader, asking voters to send him to the Colonial Council. He recalled the welcome he received on 24 March, promised to strengthen a "frank and loyal" Franco-Annamite collaboration that respected the rights of both peoples, and called for more schooling, more dignity and a fairer regime, "without violence, but also without weakness". Just before the legible text breaks off, the letter invoked the body of Phan Chau Trinh. Lower down, a letter signed by Phan Van Truong, attacking the rival Progrès Annamite, insisted that he and his companions had been arrested not as anti-militarists but because the colonial government considered them enemies. A short notice announced that Governor General Alexandre Varenne would leave on 3 October on a mission and would receive callers before he sailed.
This Prague German-language daily led with a report from Cologne: Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, addressing his German People's Party congress to a long ovation, called Germany's new League of Nations membership both valuable in itself and a stage in its foreign-policy development, praised the personal contacts made in Geneva, said it was no accident that his talk with the French foreign minister took place near Geneva, and declared that Locarno and Geneva had laid the ground for settling problems with Germany's former enemies. From London came word that Ramsay MacDonald had called the acceptance of district agreements a surrender by the miners, even as Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire voted yes and nearly 200,000 men had gone back to work. A Prague item reported that, amid a continuing price battle with potato producers, the government had ordered strict monitoring of maximum market prices, arranged cheap potatoes for Prague and permitted cheap fruit imports to curb profiteering.
This front page of 2 October 1926 carried three substantial pieces. An editorial signed W. M. welcomed the Livorno meeting between Sir Austen Chamberlain and Mussolini, arguing that Britain could broker a Franco-Italian détente without which Locarno and Thoiry would ring hollow, warning Mussolini against believing France was in decline, and urging Paris to make room for Italian expansion. A report signed J. M. set the Saint-Barthélemy debris flows in the Bois Noir, which had pushed the Rhône back against the Vaud mountains, in a line of Rhône-blocking landslides that Frédéric Montandon traced back to 563. A third article described how a small East Coast intellectual elite was using a flood of print, lecturers and the press to win 105 million Americans over to the League of Nations.
Politika of 2 October 1926 carried a reader's letter on the "Adriatic Railway," addressed directly to the paper's director with a request to publish it. The legible portion argues that experts, too, must examine the question in light of the country's general interests, then opens a numbered argument: the mountain ridges and deep river valleys running toward the sea make it impossible for any existing port on the kingdom's coast to be linked by a fan of railway lines to all its centers of production and consumption. Holding that only such branching railway traffic could make a modern port serve the whole state, the writer signals a negative answer to whether the port of Split, with a Belgrade–Sarajevo line, could fill that role.
This Saturday page opened Leiden's 3 October weekend with a lively preview. The Town Hall was tried out for the festivities and the new electric lighting at the Lunapark funfair was tested; seven choral societies rehearsed the chorale music, and the programme ran from a knights' tournament rehearsal to a children's farce and an Amsterdam cabaret, with the main celebration held over to Monday after a quiet Sunday. The paper also reported a lecture to the Society of Dutch Literature by Dr. Chr. Kroes-Ligtenberg, who compared Marie Bashkirtseff's famous diary with recent German diaries by adolescents. A notice from the Leiden Dune Water Company warned that laying new mains between Katwijk, Rijnsburg and Oegstgeest would lower water pressure for a time, and asked consumers to save water.
This October 2, 1926 front page mixed parliamentary gossip with brief official notices from Paris. A parliamentary report described how Joseph Caillaux, "the man from Mamers," had only to appear in the corridors of the Palais-Bourbon to bring some animation to the sparse, idle groups of deputies, and how their conversations returned to their usual course as soon as he left. Short Paris-datelined items reported that a decree due next day in the Journal officiel would abolish the regional customs directorates of La Rochelle and Montpellier, and that savings-bank deposits on October 1 exceeded withdrawals by 29 million. The customs item followed the closing line of a signed article by Raymond Colrat, a line referring to the grave situation in Europe, and the page also opened a notice on an international convention on maritime ports.
Books Sold on Consignment by This Paper's Publication Department
Bound Volumes of the World Daily Supplement
This partial reading of the 2 October 1926 World Daily (Shijie ribao) of Beijing covers two notices from the paper's own advertising columns. The first announced that the paper's publication department sold worthwhile Chinese books and magazines on consignment and introduced a digest of titles recently entrusted to it; in the scan its opening runs on from the tail of a clinic advertisement offering pediatric and internal-medicine injections, including German and French "914". The second promoted monthly bound volumes of the paper's supplement, stressing that Peking University professor Dr. Liu Bannong edited it, that its contributors were accomplished scholars, and that its printing and binding far surpassed ordinary bound-up old newspapers. The individual book titles and prices are not legible in this reading.
A Serious Aviation Accident Occurred Today in England
Criminals Actively Sought
Tex Rickard Will Stage a Great Festival
This Buenos Aires Crítica page of 2 October 1926 carried an Associated Press cable reporting that a French Air Union airliner bound for Croydon caught fire in the engine near Tonbridge and crashed in Kent. It said all seven aboard, five passengers plus the pilot and the mechanic, were burned beyond identification, and that local farmworkers had arrived too late to help. A long local crime report described detectives under commissioners de la Cuesta and Urruchúa raiding suburban haunts and holding many suspects incommunicado, while admitting the hunt had so far been almost fruitless. From New York, another AP dispatch announced an all-heavyweight card Tex Rickard would promote at the new Madison Square Garden, said to be an elimination to find a challenger for the new champion Gene Tunney, and listed the bouts.
Il Piccolo's front page of 2 October 1926 viewed Italian diplomacy and domestic policy through the regime's lens. A Rome dispatch said the Mussolini–Chamberlain meeting at Livorno had ranged over the whole international scene. It presented Italy and Britain, as guarantors of Locarno, weighing the Franco-German talks at Thoiry and a possible monetization of the Dawes Plan, while Tangier, Abyssinia, the Near East and the Balkans received briefer mention. A cabinet report outlined a reform of the public-security law made under parliamentary delegation, the planned appointment of prefect Arturo Bocchini as chief of police, and colonial measures on oilseed duties and Cyrenaican elections. A third piece hailed the new treaty with Yemen as the fruit of Mussolini's personal prestige.