The League and Its Critics Why the League of Nations
Assembly should have withheld its usual courtesies from Mr. de Valera and listened in profound silence to the speech in which he declared the Assembly open is by no means obvious, for the published reports of the Irish delegate's address show it to have been marked by plenty of sound sense and a wise preference for facing realities rather than magnifying small successes and glossing over failures. Not by any means everything is well with the League, not from any fault in its machinery but because the Governments which compose it show too little readiness to make it the central and the sole agent for international co-operation in every form. From that point of view the decision taken on Tuesday to hold the World Inter- national Conference at Geneva was a sound one. Geneva is the right place for all such gatherings. As for the play the critics have made of the fact that only 64 per cent. of the League subscriptions for 1932 have so far come to hand, it would be interesting to know what percentage of income tax in this country is paid three months before the final date, and how often this or any other government is able to report a saving of 13 per cent. on its estimates—as the League Secretariat has done. As The Times well put it in an admirable leading article on Wednesday, " the chief danger to the Geneva institution comes from those who do not go to Geneva."
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