LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
The League and Corfu
Sill,—Spectator in his Notebook last week assailed the Daily Express leader-writer for having expressed himself with vigour on a subject " he does not begin to understand." The subject, of course, was Mussolini's bombardment of Corfu in 1923, and the punitive inclemnity the Greeks were subsequently forced to pay. Spectator derides the Daily Express contention that the League of Nations was in any way responsible for this vicious injustice done to the Greeks. He absolves the League of Nations entirely.
He says: " What the Express leader-writer does not say and perhaps does not know is . . . that the Conference of Ambassadors handled the whole business from start to finish; and that it was the Confer- ence of Ambassadors, not the League of Nations, which required Greece to pay 50,000,000 lire to Italy."
I refer Spectator to Page 351 of A Survey of International Affairs (1920-1923) published by the British Institute of International Affairs: " The next day [the 6th September] its [the League of Nation's] members drew up at an informal meeting a plan of settlement which was laid before the Council formally the same afternoon and was immediately despatched to Paris for the Conference of Ambassadors' information; and thiS plan was adopted, with unimportant modifications, by the Ambassadors on the 7th, and accepted at their instance on the 10th by the Greek Government." I refer him also to the fact that an intrinsic part of these proposals was that Greece should deposit 50,000,000 lire forthwith with the Swiss National Bank. It was this 50,000,000 lire which the Council of Ambassadors subsequently handed over to Italy.
I notice that Spectator ended his attack on the Daily Express- with the words: " Do facts matter ? " I further notice that on the same page he used thirteen lines of print apologising for three mis-statements of fact he himself had made the previous week.—Yours faithfully, A. CHRISTIANSEN, Editor, Daily Express.
[Janus (not Spectator) writes: The Daily Express's statements were completely wrong; mine were completely right. The Express said that the League of Nations " shamefully decreed that an indemnity of £500,000 would be paid." It did not. What it suggested, on the proposal of the Greek delegate himself, was that 50 million lire should be deposited in the Swiss National Bank pending a decision by the Conference of Ambassadors. The decision when it came was bad enough to deserve all the execration which the Express_ misapplies to the League of Nations. Speaking from the League Assembly platform two days after the award, Professor Gilbert Murray said, amid loud applause, " I thank God that the League of Nations had no part or lot in the matter."—As for my own mis-statements they were of such order of magnitude as giving a well-known cricketer wrong initials.]
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