International Week

Never monotonous are the weeks of a U. S. President. Last fortnight President Hoover was preoccupied with domestic matters--Law Enforcement, the Press, Farm Relief. Last week his focus shifted to world affairs.

Elder Statesman Elihu Root arrived at the White House, just back from Geneva where, with other famed jurists, he had been revising World Court statutes. President Hoover kept him for luncheon. They talked of Mr. Root's new formula for getting the U. S. into the Court over the Senate's reservation against advisory opinions. Secretary of State Stimson was present, a statesman with an ear quick and open to Elder Statesman Root, who gave him his first law job and later took him in as a junior partner.

Then Idaho's Borah, in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called upon the President. He had many a thing to say about the World Court, about reparations, about naval armaments.

Then, most exciting of all, Hugh Gibson, U. S. Ambassador to Belgium, chair-man of the U. S. Delegation to the League of Nations preparatory Arms Conference at Geneva, delivered at Geneva the Hoover formula for reduction (not limitation) of naval armaments. How would the Powers take to his plan? Carefully, secretly President Hoover had planted his armament reduction idea in Chief Delegate Gibson's mind during quiet White House evenings a month ago, when the Powers despaired of success at the forthcoming conference.

Last week, as in upon the White House rolled a worldwide rumble of praise for the U. S. President who had suddenly freshened a stale subject, that U. S. President looked pleased.

P: Forty famed engineers gathered at the White House luncheon table. After the meal they awarded to their host, President Hoover, the John Fritz gold medal, highest honor of the American Engineering Societies--civil, mining & metallurgical, mechanical, electrical.

P:President Hoover appointed Lawrence M. Judd, rancher and county supervisor of Honolulu, to be Governor of Hawaii, succeeding Wallace Rider Farrington. eight-year incumbent. Another appointment: William D. L. Starbuck, New York mechanical engineer, patent attorney, Democrat, to the Federal Radio Commission. As President Coolidge had unsuccessfully done before him, President Hoover sent to the Senate for confirmation the name of Irvine Luther Lenroot, onetime (1918-27) Senator from Wisconsin, to be Judge on the U. S. Court of Customs & Patents Appeals.

P: President Hoover takes joy in slipping away from his newsgathering shadows. Last week he succeeded in motoring without them to Catoctin Furnace, Md., to fish peacefully in Hunting Creek with Detective-Secretary Lawrence Richey. All that the newsgatherers learned was that the President caught a pound-and-a-half trout, inspected a site for a ten-room log cabin, ate a picnic supper under the trees with Mrs. Hoover. After dusk he drove back to Washington. His shadows politely rebuked him.