Shamefaced Bankers

The oldest Parliament in the world sat up all one night last week--that is from 7 p.m. until 5 a.m., for at this time of year two-thirds of the 24 hours is night in Iceland.

On the carpet were called the Island Kingdom's foremost capitalists, the Directors of the Bank of Iceland. They did not come shivering, for the kindly Gulf Stream makes Reykjavik winters temperate. In fact "Iceland" is a complete misnomer for a land abounding in volcanoes and hot springs (many a farmer warms his house with hot water radiators piped directly from his spring). But though the Directors of the Bank of Iceland did not come shivering they came shamefaced.

Since 1925, when a dividend of 5% was paid, the Bank has shown no profit. Meanwhile the country at large has been hugely prosperous, swiftly progressive. Proportional to the number of her 103,000 inhabitants, that is per capita, Iceland now has the largest foreign trade of any nation whatsoever ($19,912,400 exports in 1928, and $15,008,000 imports, thus leaving a favorable trade balance of $4,904,400 which is more than frugal Iceland's na- tional debt). Moreover, neither France nor England has as many telephones per capita as Iceland. Amid such evidence of soundness and prosperity there was simply no proper reason, last week, why the Bank of Iceland should be on the brink of ruin --except mismanagement.

Vainly the Directors sought to defend their policies. They asked the "Mother of Parliaments" to tide them over with a loan of $402,000 and to guarantee their liabilities, this to stop a run which had started on the Bank. Gravely legislators whose Parliament has stood for just five months less than 1,000 years pondered the Directors' plea. It was in June 930 that the Parliament, or Althing, was founded. In June 1930 two complete steamerloads of Icelandic-Americans will sail from Manhattan for Reykjavik, bearing a $50,000 goodwill statue of Leif Ericson, gift of the baby Congress at Washington, still in its teething* stage at the age of 131.

After ten consecutive hours of deliberation and debate, the Althing at 5 a.m. dealt harshly with the Bank of Iceland. Ordered was a searching investigation which Icelandic economists are certain will prove that the Bank is bankrupt. In this case, by decree of the angry Althing, it will be liquidated and its business probably transferred to the prosperous Farm Bank of Reykjavik.

Most prosperous of all Iceland institutions is the Icelandic Association for the Promotion of the Fishing Trade--one of the few instances of a successful national monopoly. Through this association all Icelandic fishermen present a united front to European buyers of cod and herring. Experience has shown that by this method they can demand and get higher prices than ever before. Jealously guarded are Iceland's lucrative fisheries. Day and night they are patrolled by the country's two icebreakers, the Thor and the Odin. Trespassing trawlers are hauled before a civil court, and up to the present time fines imposed on such fish poachers have sufficed to pay the expenses of the patrol.

In Reykjavik there are no street cars, but many a Buick taxicab. Constantly soaring back and forth across the country --a little smaller than Bulgaria or Kentucky--are two sturdy planes of the German Lufthansa. Two summers ago a German tourist brought several bags of vegetable seed, with the result that many nourishing plants, hitherto unknown in Iceland, sprouted and flourished last summer. But the Icelanders were not particularly pleased. They obey by instinct Explorer Stefansson's rule: A people react with pleasure to a new food in proportion as they have been accustomed to a varied diet. Accustomed to an unvarying fish, smoked mutton, cheese and potato diet the Icelanders view green vegetables with alarm. They delight, however, in repeating that "Proportional to the number of Icelanders our Reykjavik is the largest capital city in the world!" By this they mean that one quarter of the population is concentrated in Reykjavik, whereas only 1/217 of all U. S. citizens live in Washington, D. C.

Of Social Conditions in his country the Icelandic Publicist Halldor Kiljan Laxness has written: "Organized religion fares badly in Iceland. Ministers of religion have no prestige and the churches as a rule are empty on Sunday. . . . The Catholics have built a gorgeous cathedral at Reykjavik, though there are only about 150 Catholics in the town. . . .

"In Iceland we look upon businessmen with the same skepticism with which literary men are regarded in some other countries. . . . The ambition of every genuine young Icelander is to become a literary man. . . . Our most important statesmen have all been literary men--poets, authors, historians and educators.

" Greatest of living Icelandic statesmen is Jonas Jonsson, "The Mussolini of the North," who is Minister of Justice and Ecclesiastics and of course a "literary man." Like Il Duce he is said to have a jealous eye upon the Crown, not with a view to seizing it for himself but with intent to make Iceland a republic. Today the King of Iceland is also King Christian X of Denmark. But eager Icelandic-Americans explain: "Iceland is completely independent of Denmark. It is like two corporations in America, one may be a silk mill and the other an iron mine, who pay the same man to be president of both companies, though they are completely independent." Genial King Christian, leaving all his Danish courtiers behind, will go to Iceland next June and try to act as much like an Icelander as possible, will open the festival celebrating the 1000th anniversary of Iceland's Parliament with a speech he is now valiantly trying to learn--in Icelandic.

*Particularly infantile was debate in Washington over the statue last September. Representative Olger B. Burtness of North Dakota's first district introduced the appropriation bill with this ringing preamble: ."Whereas the first white man to set foot on American soil was a native son of Iceland Leif Ericson, an able and fearless sailor who in the year 1,000 A.D. discovered the American mainland. . . ."

Furiously to his feet leaped Congressman Fiorello ("Little Flower") La Guardia of New York, many of whose constituents are known to their neighbors as "wops." Valiantly he fought and triumphantly he won for the discovery of America by "Eyetalian" Columbus. The teething Congress, scared as a babe at whom someone cries "Boo!" passed the $50,000 appropriation for Leif Ericson's statue without hailing him as Discoverer.

In Iceland several families have documentary evidence to prove that they are descendants of "the first European born on American soil," famed Snorri (begotten by one of Leif Ericson's men), who later became eminent in the Iceland of six centuries before the Mayflower.

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