The League of Nations
How Great Britain's New Delegates Have Shaped
THE British delegates at the League Assembly arc unques- tionably keeping Geneva lively. Their advent was awaited with curiosity, partly on personal grounds partly on political. The reasons for the latter are obvious enough. As to the former, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald's brief appearance in 1924, and the enthusiastic camaraderie established between him and M. Herriot, are well remembered still by Assembly habitués. Also, foreign affairs being naturally all-important at Geneva, there was some natural eagerness to discover how Sir Austen Chamberlain's mantle would lie on Mr. Henderson's shoulders.
By this time opinions on all such points are crystallizing. The main conclusion everyone has reached is that the energies of the British delegation have no visible limit. Someone once observed that the first tendency of the British at Geneva when faced with a new proposition was to ask themselves " What is wrong with this ? " However that may have been, the British delegation of 1929 approaches new departures with no such scepticism. As a rule, indeed, it is the initiator of them itself. And if British delegations of the past have tended on the whole to be laconic the delegation of 1929 must have beaten all records for the columns of oratory which it has called on the stenographers to perpetuate.
Part of this, no doubt, is due to the zeal of the new broom —not that a Labour Government can be considered a tyro in League affairs, for the Labour foreign affairs committee has been studying everything done at Geneva closely for years and many of the activities of the delegation to-day are merely the application of long-considered policies. Part of it, on the other hand, is due to the zeal of youth itself, for the inclusion of Mr. Hugh Dalton and Mr. Philip Baker, neither of whom knows what it is yet to experience the maturity of forty-five, brings down the average age-level of the delegation appreciably. The point is worth making, for a foreign delegate who has known the League from its earliest years commented the other day with enthusiasm on the appearance at Geneva of these and other newcomers with careers before them as a welcome change from " the old men who only learn what the League means just when they are going to die."
In point of fact the delegation must be judged to have combined enterprise with caution very commendably. It has tabled many new proposals, but none of them is revolu- tionary. It made exacting demands on the time of the plenary Assembly by putting up all its three Cabinet Ministers to make major speeches in the course of the general discussion, but every speech had substance in it and directly affected the work of the League. That is particularly true of Mr. -William Graham, President of the Board of Trade, who, though he had, I believe, never seen the Assembly, and had certainly never sat in it, before, made a speech as admirable both in form and substance as any delivered from the tribune in the course of this session. That, it may be added, is the universal opinion, not merely an individual judgment.
A word on certain of the delegation's words and acts is relevant, not so much as providing material for verdicts on the delegation itself as serving to illustrate the proper relationship between a national delegation and the League. Mr. Ramsay MacDonald's speech at the beginning of the general discussion elicited an interesting comment. I asked Dr. Nansen the same afternoon what he thought of it, as a delegate who has never missed a session of the Assembly yet. He found in it a new note altogether. " Here," he said, " you have the Prime Minister of Great Britain coming to the Assembly to report on his negotiations with America, on the troubles in Palestine, on the situation in Egypt. That -is really making the Assembly an international forum. It is placing the League in the centre of world affairs." It is only -fair to recall in that connexion that Sir Austen Chamberlain has more than once gone out of his way to lay frankly before the Council of the League information on questions in the field of British Foreign affairs which he was under no direct obligation to.impart to the League at all. Even so, it remains time that so far as the Assembly is concerned—and the
Assembly is a forum as the Council was never meant to be— the British Prime Minister did strike a new and by common consent a welcome note.
But if the British delegates are keeping the Assembly interested they are also keeping it busy. A mere glance at the list of resolutions moved is enough to indicate that. Mr. Graham proposed a two years' abstinence from tariff increases on the part of all members of the League. He may not get quite that, but his idea has been cordially received and there seems no doubt that at least a governmental conference will be convened to endeavour to get a convention on the lines suggested through. International action in respect of coal is also likely to be pursued in the manner advocated by the President of the Board of Trade. In these matters, Mr. Graham, who was unable to remain at Geneva for any committee discussions, has been fortunate in knowing that that department of the work is being as capably handled as it so far has been by Mr. Dalton, the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, who has the great advantage of being an expert in a field with which Foreign Offices will have more and more to concern themselves.
. Mr. Henderson's official contributions (as distinct from a less official, or rather less formal, move to get the Assembly held in something approaching decency and comfort in the years that must still intervene before the League's new buildings are available) were a proposal that the Covenant should be amended so as to bring it into harmony with the Kellogg Pact, which almost all signatories of the Covenant have also signed, and another for a general enquiry into the working of the League Secretariat after the first ten years. There is no spirit of criticism about this latter move, which is dictated simply by a desire to ensure that conditions of service in the Secretariat are such as to enable it to attract the ablest men and women from every country.
As for the revision of the Covenant, which to a minority seems a little like tampering with sacred things, it is designed to remove the anomaly springing from the fact that virtually the same body of States has signed one document declaring that war under certain circumstances (admittedly rare) is permissible and another declaring that it is never permissible at all. The proposal to alter a few words of the Covenant so that it excludes war between individual States as com- pletely as the Kellogg Pact seems open to no serious objection.
Oddly enough the one move at which the orthodox might
a little shake their heads—for in the matter of the Convention on Financial Assistance Mr. Henderson has taken the project up precisely where Sir Austen Chamberlain left it and has attached to his support of it precisely the same conditions and reservations—is the work of the one non-Labour member of the delegation, Lord Cebil. It has fallen to him, acting, of course, with the full concurrence of his colleagues, to agitate the French considerably by a resolution he has framed with the idea of keeping the question of land disarmament still open. At the last meeting of the Preparatory Commis- sion, Lord Cushendun, being the British delegate, a rather scrappy discussion ended in the approval of certain principles, on lines agreeable to the French, on such matters as the limitation—or non-limitation—of the period of conscript service, of military budgets and of actual material of war. At the next meeting of the Commission the British delegate will be Lord Cecil, and he has no desire to find himself con- fronted with a fait accompli and told that everything to do with land disarmament is already a closed chapter so far as the Preparatory Commission is concerned.
The Assembly is not over and the British delegation has
time to disgrace itself yet. But it distinctly has not done that so far. On the contrary, it has displayed a combination of enterprise and moderation which, so far as this particular department of national life is concerned, entitles it to national support. Its own liveliness acting as a stimulus to other delegations, it has undoubtedly communicated considerable vitality to the Assembly.
YOUR GENEVA CORRESPONDENT.
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