The League of Nations
British Issues before the Council
LAST week's meeting of the League of Nations Council, lasting as it did just three and a half days, was nearly if not quite the shortest on record. That being so, the fact that Mr. Henderson thought it worth while to travel out from London, that M. Briand forsook The Hague for Geneva, that Signor Grandi came from Rome, M. Zaleskifrom Warsaw and M. Procope from Helsingfors, while Dr. Curtius was only prevented at the last moment by the Schacht controversy from seating himself in Dr. Stresemann's old chair, is satisfactory testi- mony to the place which the League holds to-day in the estimation of the Foreign Ministers of Europe.
That position has had to be built up through years of slow growth, and the contrast between the League of to-day and the League of the first beginnings was impressed on observers of the recent meeting by the references publicly made to the first Council meeting of all which had been held in Paris ten years precisely from the day on which last week's Council closed. At the table in the glass room at Geneva sat only two men who had seats round the red baize in the Clock Hall at the Quai d'Orsay in 1920—the Secretary- General, Sir Eric Drummond, and Seifor Quinones de Leon, the Spanish member of the Council, who fittingly supple- mented the President's official reference to the anniversary with a few words of personal reminiscence.
Tux COVENANT AND ME PEACE PACT.
Chance, rather than design, threw Great Britain rather into the forefront of this fifty-eighth Council meeting. The Council, to begin with, had to deal with two proposals which British delegates had brought forward at the last Assembly, one regarding a conference to arrange a tariff truce, the other aiming at an amendment of the League Covenant so as to bring it into harmony with the Kellogg Pact. On the latter point a short but important discussion developed unexpectedly. The Council's business was to appoint a committee to consider the wording of the desired amend- ments, which the Assembly will have to adopt or reject next September. But when this came forward Mr. Henderson seized the opportunity to make a valuable and significant statement designed to disabuse the minds of anyone who might suppose that in deciding hurriedly to revise the Covenant because it differed in some respects from the Kellogg Pact, League members were in some sense admitting t he inferiority of their own charter.
The British Foreign Secretary would have none of that. The Covenant, he pointed out, represented the possibilities of 1919, the Pact of Paris the possibilities of 1928. Now that the latter had been demonstrated by the signature of the Pact, it was proper that they should be embodied in the Covenant too. The Kellogg Pact took away the right of private war altogether. In that respect the Covenant, amended as it was proposed to amend it, would now go equally far in its prohibitions. It would still, moreover, go considerably further than the Pact does, since no League member was by signing the Pact dispensed from any of the Covenant's obligations in respect of investigation, concilia- tion or arbitration, or from the consequences contemplated by the Covenant in the event of any breach of those obliga- tions. " We regard the Covenant," said the Foreign Secre- tary, " as the fundamental constitution of the organized international society of States. . . ."
These are notable words, and they were followed by others not less notable from the lips of M. Briand, who, as the originator of the Paris Pact, could speak with unique authority when he declared that if there had been any thought of the possibility of the Pact's doing despite to the Covenant, the Pact idea would never have been launched. One sentence in the French Foreign Minister's speech, in which he insisted that the League must be prepared to meet the horror of war with something more than mere words, seems to suggest that the French still cherish the idea of organizing a little further in the direction of the forcible repression of war in case of need than some other League members might fully approve. In that case the new com- mittee, on which Lord Cecil is the British member, may have to steer delicately at times. -
THE TARIFF TRUCE CONFERENCE.
' The second British proposal, regarding a Tariff Truce Conference, provoked no discussion, partly because a certain pessimism as to the prospects of the Conference prevails.
Herr von Schubert, in proposing the convocation of the Conference for February 20th, dwelt on the importance of the attendance of as many Ministers of Commerce or Finance as possible. The enunciation of that principle gained in importance in the light of what happened at a minor League Conference, that on the treatment of foreigners, held a few weeks earlier in Paris. The position there was that after the League as a whole had approved the principle of a more liberal treatment of foreign traders and foreign enterprises in all countries, the self-same States which through their Ministers had endorsed the principle sent as delegates to the conference officials who, by their hostility to the very principle itself, made the adoption of a convention on the lines contemplated impossible. Unless other countries follow the example of Great Britain, which will be represented at the Tariff Conference by the President of the Board of Trade, and send into council the men actually responsible for devising and administering tariffs, all hope of success may be dismissed. At the best success will be hard enough to achieve.
MANDATES.
The third field in which Great Britain happened to figure largely was that of mandates, which provoked a discussion instructive as indicating that the League in this sphere turns just as critical an eye on Great Powers as on small. The South African Government, which will never quite abandon the claim to " sovereignty " over the mandate territory of South West Africa, in spite of the flat refusal of the League Council to admit any such pretension, was mildly rebuked by the rapporteur, M. Procope, Foreign Minister of Finland, and much less mildly by Herr von Schubert, of Germany, for its attempts to " nationalize " the natives of South West Africa. The proposals of the Hilton Young Report regarding Tanganyika (a mandate area), Uganda and Kenya were referred to as something that needed watching but could be left until the Government's policy was declared. In the matter of Samoa and the disturbances there, sympathy was expressed with the New Zealand Government in its difficulties, which it is held on the whole to have faced in a proper spirit.
Then there was Iraq, which Great Britain hopes to sponsor into League membership in 1932. The Council's attitude on that was a little non-committal. Signor Grandi, of Italy, made the point that so long as Iraq was under mandate it had to grant equal economic opportunity to all members of the League. It would have to be considered how far those privileges would be sacrificed through Iraq's admission to the League. To that Mr. Henderson replied that if a State was independent enough to be admitted to the League it must be considered independent enough to control its own tariff arrangements.
Regarding Palestine, on which at the present moment there is most to be said, little was, in fact, said at all, for the Mandates Commission is to hold a special session on that subject alone, and till then the Council suspends dis- cussion. But Mr. Henderson did, after various obstacles had been surmounted in the course of private conversations, secure approval for the appointment of a small commission of three, none of them British, to settle once for all the respective rights and obligations of Jews and Moslems at the Wailing Wall. No other aspect of the contentious question of the Holy Places is to be touched on or prejudged in any way.
This is the first time that an Italian Foreign Minister has ever appeared at the Council table, and the present holder of that office, Signor Grandi, made a distinctly favourable impression. It is to be hoped that he will be as regular in attendance as his British, _French and German colleagues. YOUR GENEVA CORRESPONDENT.
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