The League of Nations
The Tenth Assembly's Possibilities
THE dominating fact in regard to the Tenth Assembly of the League of Nations is the presence of a new Government in Great Britain. That was made entirely clear by the first day the Assembly opened. A speech by Briand is always something of an event, a speech by Stresemann hardly less so. But this year it is the British Prime Minister who is to set the note. He is to speak first among the big men, and what the French Prime Minister and the German Foreign Minister will say will be determined largely by the line Mr. Ramsay MacDonald has taken before them.
The speech will have been delivered when these lines are being read, as it has not been while they are being written, but it can hardly depart very far from the expected lines. It will almost certainly be calculated to reassure anxious publicists on the Continent of Europe, whom events at The Hague have left in a state of baffled and rather pathetic perplexity. In the face of compelling facts they have had to recognize at last that the British Prime Minister was absolutely at one with the execrable Yorkshireman (it appears to be almost a capital offence in the eyes of French political journalists to hail from Yorkshire) whom he chose as his Chancellor of the Exchequer. But what are the implications of that unwelcome truth ? Has British foreign policy radically changed, giving a new orientation to the whole international relationships of Europe ? That is the question that is being widely asked at Geneva and which it will be the purpose of the British delegation to answer, not in a single speech, but by its attitude throughout this year's Assembly.
The answer will unquestionably be reassuring. The Hague is over and done with. It might have gone differently. It might have gone better and it might have gone worse. But at least the problem of reparations is out of the way, and the Rhineland occupation will soon be a thing of the past. These are commonplaces which it would be to no purpose to touch on here but for the bearing they have on immediate prospects at Geneva. For the first time the League will be free to discharge its proper function of main- taining and stabilizing peace in a pacified world. Mr. Henderson possibly went a little far in declaring, on his arrival at Geneva from The Hague a few days ago, that with the withdrawal of the Allied troops from the Rhineland we could say for the first time since 1914: " The War is ended " ; but there is sufficient truth in the declaration to condone any slight exaggeration it may embody. The League henceforward will be a League freed for the first time from shackles.
How is that freedom to be used ? It looks as if the chief task of this year's Assembly would be to take certain practical steps forward along the road, mapped out in the League's first days, that leads from a war-stained to a peaceful and an ordered world. International legislation, in the form of treaties and conventions, will not alone achieve that, but treaties and conventions are the outward signs and pledges of national resolves. They are dams and barriers thrown up at leisure when the river is low to stand a sudden stress when it threatens to overflow its banks. If each Assembly can raise that dam a little higher till the necessary security is at last achieved, the League of Nations will have faithfully fulfilled its purpose.
This year—that is to say, this month and this week--- one not inconsiderable part of the task presenting itself is the strengthening of the authority of the Permanent Court of International Justice. The statutes of the Court have been revised by an expert committee in the light of seven years' experience, and the Assembly will, no doubt, approve the changes recommended with a view to enhancing the Court's efficiency. Equally certainly it will approve the formula so happily devised by Mr. Elihu Root to enable the United States to associate itself with the work of the Court as a full member. And equally certainly again the signature, or promise of the signature, by Great Britain of the Optional Clause of the Court statutes will stimulate a number of other States to like action, so that the date will not be distant when a clear majority, and quite possibly a substantial majority, of the members of the League will have declared themselves prepared to submit any legal dispute in which they may be engaged to the judgment of the Court if that opponent desires it—though the adoption of some other and less formal method of settlement by common consent is, of course, in no way excluded. If that step is taken it will mean a new vindication of the rule of law between nations.
All this means fighting war by providing compulsory alterna- tives to war. That process can be assisted, and is about to be assisted, unless the omens are misleading, by other measures tending to make war more difficult and dangerous for any nation than it is already. Those who have watched the League of Nations closely and studied the psychology of Governments find it not a little astonishing that the proposal known as the " Provision of Financial Assistance for States Victims of Aggression," should have won the approval of practical statesmen of all countries, including, so far as Great Britain is concerned, Sir Austen Chamberlain, no less than Mr. Arthur Henderson.
To explain the scheme in all its details would require a full page of the Spectator. It is enough to say here that the origin of the proposal was the very reasonable contention put forward by certain States, Finland in particular, that they were bound to provide themselves in time of peace with armaments on a quite unnecessarily extensive scale because if ever they were threatened with attack their credit would be shattered and they would find themselves unable to replenish their stocks in a moment of crisis. If, they submitted, they could somehow be guaranteed credit if they found themselves the victims of aggression, then they could be content to keep their peace-time armaments at a very moderate level.
This was only a beginning. Out of it emerged the realization that if, in fact, the nations of the world were prepared, when a grave international dispute was threatened, to say : " We will give our financial help to disputant A who seems to us to be acting in accordance with all the canons of the Covenant," that would, in fact, be equivalent to saying—in studiously unprovocative language : " We shall consequently withhold all financial assistance from State B which seems to us to be at fault." A scheme, therefore, which in all its details is strictly financial, and financial in a highly technical degree, may become a moral instrument so valuable as largely to replace the much-discussed sanctions specified in Article 16 of the Covenant. The word " replace " is, perhaps, hardly accurate for, in fact, the scheme is a perfectly legitimate application of Article 16 except that it has the great advantage of being ostensibly designed as a measure of assistance to one party and only indirectly, and by implication, as a measure of hostility to the other. If, in fact, the scheme does work as it is meant to work, its application would be so tremendous a warning to an offending State that aggression under such circumstances could hardly be conceived. The scheme has been moulded by the best financial brains in Europe for more than two years, and if this Assembly does, in the end, set the final seal of endorsement on it a very practical step towards international suppression of war will have been achieved.
In all these matters, and in regard to many other lesser subjects that might be mentioned, the attitude of the British Government this year will be all-important. Already in the Council meetings that preceded the Assembly it was made evident that that attitude will be one of vigorous initiative. Initiative, no doubt, can be carried too far. The enthusiasm of a new Government, and a Government of the Left at that, may easily lead it into indiscretions. But the compelling force of the status quo, though not quite as great, perhaps, at Geneva as in some other places, is great enough to put an effective brake on schemes in which the ideal may seem to have obliterated practical considerations. We stand, unquestionably, on the threshold of one of the most interesting meetings the League of Nations has yet held.
YOUR GENEVA CORRESPONDENT.
Geneva, September 2nd.
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