An International Loss * * * *
The sudden death of M. Albert Thomas is more than a heavy blow to the International Labour Organization, for there was always the prospect that M. Thomas would some day return to French politics, where he would have assumed at once a foremost place. He was in the direct succession of Jaures, and the international experience he had gained in twelve years at Geneva' would have 'added immensely to his political authority. His remarkable oratorical powers, moreover, would have had a scope largely denied them hitherto. As for the International Labour Office, it is difficult to imagine it without him. It has never known any other head, and he was its architect as well as its director, for the Labour clauses in the Treaty of Versailles are very largely his handiwork. His forceful personality accommodated itself with some difficulty to the restraints of an office which theoretically at any rate involved the execution of policy rather than its initiation, and his strictures on various Governments, including from time to time the British, went a good deal beyond what most international officials would permit themselves. There could be no higher testimony to his personality than the fact that in spite of that he made innumerable friends and no enemies. Mr. Harold Butler, who seems his obvious successor, possesses qualities fundamentally different but of no less high an order.
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