The League of Nations
Work for the World's Moral Health
{Dame Edith Lyttelton has been British Delegate-Substitute at the League of Nations Assembly in 1923, 1926 and 1927, and in those years was British representative on the Assembly Commission dealing with humanitarian questions.—En. Spectator.] ALMOST without being aware of it, the Council of the League has been led into delegating various kinds of social service work, such as child welfare, refugee settlements, opium restriction, traffic in women and children, to expert bodies. A week or so ago Major Walter Elliot wrote in the Spectator about the League's Health Organization and all the wonderful pre- ventive work it is- doing throughout the world. This week's article will deal with one only of the humanitarian efforts of the League, the campaign against the traffic in women and children, for there is a great deal more to be said about it than can be got into the compass of a page.
For four years an advisory committee has sat in Geneva, trying to devise _ the best means to suppress the traffic in women and children—a traffic degrading to its promoters as well as its victims, a blot on civilization, a menace—as can be demonstrated—to the health, the stability, the spirituality of the whole human race. It is due to the vision and initiative of an American woman, Miss Grace Abbott, head of the Child Labour Bureau in Washington, that finally the Council nominated a Commission to make an expert inquiry in the countries where the traffic was supposed to exist. Some money was forthcoming from the Bureau of Social Hygiene in America, and the experts set to work. They were not content merely to go to various Governments and voluntary organiza- tions and collect statistics, but were determined to investigate and to see for themselves, where it existed, if it did exist ; how great the evil was ; collect such information as would make the task of suppressing it possible in the future.
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