WaybackWire

LONDON, Monday.—Sir Edward Grey told the House of Commons to-day that he has asked for all active military operations to be suspended at Vienna, St Petersburg and Belgrade while the ambassadors of France, Germany and Italy confer with him in London. Reuter learns that France and Italy have accepted the conference.

While the dispute lay between Austria-Hungary and Servia alone, the Foreign Secretary said, Britain had no title to interfere. If relations between Austria-Hungary and Russia became threatening, it would be a question of the peace of Europe. “In a crisis so grave as this, the efforts of one Power alone to preserve the peace must be quite ineffective.”

Once the dispute ceased to be one between Austria-Hungary and Servia and became one in which another Great Power was involved, he warned, “it can but end in the greatest catastrophe that has ever befallen the Continent of Europe at one blow”. He thought the Servian reply, as published this morning, should at least provide a basis for a settlement. Germany, he said, is favourable to mediation in principle between Austria-Hungary and Russia, but has not yet answered on the conference.

In the Lords, Lord Crewe said the consequences of an extension of the difficulty “are so terrifying to contemplate that we all shrink from the notion of such an extension”.

London is not without hope. “Competent observers estimate that the odds in favor of peace as against war may now be roughly put as five to four,” the New York Times correspondent here cables.

POTSDAM, Monday.—The Kaiser is home. Back from his North Cape cruise, “his Majesty, bronzed and grave, reached Potsdam at 3:10 o’clock this afternoon”, the New York Times correspondent reports. Thousands came out from Berlin to meet him at the Wildpark station.

“Many Germans consider that on the Kaiser rests the peace of Europe,” a Berlin dispatch says.

Others are hastening back to their capitals. President Poincare, instead of visiting Copenhagen and Christiania, is returning hastily to Paris, and Mr Asquith has come back to Downing Street from the country.

In Paris the Minister of War has conferred with General Joffre, and all prefects and provincial telegraph officials away on holiday have been recalled.

LONDON, Monday.—Money took fright across Europe to-day. “Heavy runs were today started on savings banks throughout Germany,” a Berlin dispatch reports, with depositors queuing to draw out their money in Berlin, Danzig, Cologne and other cities.

The bourses of Brussels, Vienna and Budapest have been suspended. Vienna’s is shut from Monday to Wednesday, and the bank rate there stands at 5 per cent. In London Consols fell 1 3/4 to 71 1/2.

Asked in the Commons whether the Government would strengthen the gold reserves, Mr Asquith replied that “the maintenance of adequate gold reserves is primarily the duty of the banking community”.

The fright has reached the rubber market. “The political crisis has been the cause of heavy continental selling,” the Straits Times’s London correspondent cables, Malaccas, Trusts and Kuala Lumpurs being chiefly affected. Penang brokers had word from London that “Warlike rumours have caused quite a panic in the market.” One broker was unmoved: “the local market has been so absolutely quiet of late that it is scarcely capable of suffering a further set-back.” A further drop in tin is expected.

SINGAPORE, Monday.—The Malaya Tribune sees in Vienna’s conduct a “manifest intention to chastise Servia”, and finds the prospects of peace for another week “shadowy in the extreme”. France, it notes, is unprepared, and civil war is imminent in the United Kingdom.

Its reading of the hour is grim: “so extreme the tension, so uncompromising and menacing the attitude of Austria and Germany, so evident the intention of Russia to precipitate the long-pending struggle between the great Teutonic and Slav races, that the die may be cast at any moment and Europe be plunged into a war which it needs little prescience to foresee will assuredly have very far-reaching effects.”

Of Servia’s chances the paper is in no doubt: “the task of wiping Servia off the map would be accomplished in a very few weeks, or at all events long before the dawn of the new year.”