22 OCTOBER 1932, Page 15

CHEESE-PARING AT GENEVA

[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—Returning last Saturday from Geneva and the League Assembly, I resumed at once the best of our national habits, and bought the Spectator at Dover. Turning to your " News of the Week " I read that " the one achievement " by which the British Delegation had distinguished itself at the Assembly, was " a niggling attack on every Department of the League's expenditure."

As a member of the Delegation, who was personally quite unconcerned with the unenviable task which you aptly describe as " paring cheese," I may perhaps be allowed to offer a purely personal opinion on your criticisms, which I think hardly come up to your usual high standard of fairness.

I will not argue the question of whether a thorough re. examination of League expenditure, especially on salaries, was not demanded by the necessities, and by the spirit, of the times in which we live. If I were to argue it. however, I should ask what would have been the effect on world opinion, if the Assembly had, this year, shirked the investigation which almost every one of the League's member States has had to make in respect of its own Civil Service.

I cannot offer any useful opinion on the individual economics made, but I can say from knowledge that our delegates supported no " cut " light-heartedly. Sometimes they were even found on the side of the angels (I assume, naturally, that the angels would always advocate expenditure on good objects whatever the state of the Budget). The British Delegation supported an appropriation in next year's Budget for the new Slavery Conunission, but were in a minority on this point. On the other hand we were with the majority in voting the necessary sum to establish the machinery for working the 1931 Convention on Drugs.

I admit these are small matters by comparison with the large questions opened up by discussion of secretariat salaries. and the corollary, secretariat re-organization, in which the British took a leading part. You describe their attitude as " niggling," but it is of little use to discuss economies on broad lines. " Detailed - would surely be a less harsh and juster word to use.

The deplorable thing about this Assembly was not so much the spirit in which retrenchment was discussed, as the fact that so little of importance was discussed besides retrenchment.

[The economies the British delegation effected were incon- siderable, and the impression created by such moves as Sir Hilton Young's attempt to get the London office of the League closed was deplorable.—En. Spectator.]