Mr. Balfour, on Wednesday, December 220, gave the House of
Commons an interesting account of the first year's work of the League of Nations. The Court of International Justice, he said, would come into existence as soon as more than half the member-nations bad ratified the scheme ; the court would have compulsory jurisdiction only over those nations which accepted a supplementary protocol to' that effect. Amendments to the Covenant would be considered first by a committee of the Council, and then by the Council, before being submitted to the next Assembly. Mr. Balfour spoke hopefully of the plan, adopted by the League Council, of permitting poor countries to issue bonds on the security of their land or other assets, and of encouraging other countries to accept these bonds in pay- ment for their exports. The League had been hampered by leek of money in its campaign against typhus in Eastern Europe and in its efforts on behalf of the Russian and German prisoners of war. Mr. Balfour said that we could not afford to abandon the experiment of the League. The Covenant might be modi- fied, but we could never go back to the international disorganiza- tion of the past, or retrace one of the greatest steps ever taken by civilization.
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