THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS' SECOND ASSEMBLY. [To THE EDITOR OF
THE " SPECTATOR.") SIR,—The second yearly Assembly of the League of Nations completed on October 1st the fourth week of its sittings. To have watched it is to discover features which are assuredly those of an institution hitherto unparalleled in history, yet it is possible to sum up this constitutional paradox in few words, as it appears to an unprejudiced onlooker. The League of Nations has, under the name of Secretariat, a permanent admin- istrative body working out—but perpetually ad referendum— the purposes inscribed in the Covenant. This Secretariat is not an Executive. It can put forth no force of any binding effect. The executive powers available for its support reside entirely in the member States of the League, and each of those States grants them by an exercise of its own sovereignty.
The Assembly of the League members is as a Parliament attached to this administrative board, and appears thus to control a kind of Civil Service attached directly to a multi- national assembly of delegates. Each of these has instructions in his pocket, limiting and ticketing the executive power, which, in each case, his State is prepared to expend upon the application and fulfilment of the terms of the original Coveuaut of 1919, as he understands it. The initiation of measures rests with the Delegates in a small degree, with the States they represent for the most part, and with the Secretariat only as a body of experts in the administration of the Covenant. Tho history of social constitutions has never seen anything like this. If in this multi-national organism there is ever to appear a seat of executive power, it will show itself to be located in the Council, though only a consulting body, but formed of personalities such as more directly and more par- ticularly represent and pledge actual Governments. The Council has thus near to its hand the means of imposing the will of the League, should any such emerge clearly from the general sentiment and judgment of this extraordinary organism. Thus far the Council should be held to be a political body, attended by an Assembly which is purely deliberative.
But, now when the League has acquired a judicial weapon for peace in the form of the International Court of Justice, some of the political authority of the Council may either pass away, or be placed at the disposal of the Court, as its "secular " arm. At any rate, it would seem that the existence of the Court will henceforth throw considerably into the shade Article 10 of the Covenant. The under-currents of the Assembly are already moving with perceptible speed towards its disappearance in its present drastic and unqualified shape, just as those currents have eaten their way into the solidity of Article 16. That " economic weapon " of the League now presents a much- obscured picture of its former self. For those reasons, and many more, journalists and politicians would pursue a wise course if they abstained from cavilling at the League. The League exists, and is perfecting itself, as an appliance for the saving of blood, tears, and money. This year the essential articles of the Covenant have come under a searching and light-bringing course of investigation. The general disposition to disengage national sovereignties from the fetters laid upon them by Article 10, the labour bestowed upon the recasting of Article 16, both show confidence in the growth of peace-will. A clearing-up of the several rights and reciprocal obligations of members is in course, because it is realized that the matters in which the League may properly intervene are contained within the borderland between nationalism and inter- nationalism. Even the purely humanitarian and social activi- ties of the League are so situated. So the Assembly observed the rules of opportuneness and worldly wisdom in dealing with proposals for the relief of the starving in Sovietic Russia. In regard to the Bolivian-Chilian embarrassment, it employed the same persuasive mode of action which it had applied to the consideration of the Polish-Lithuanian tangle. In both cases it placed beyond contention the inalienable right of any inter- ested party, at all time and at every stage of a nationalistic controversy, to lift the debate upon the plane upon which the League is enabled to intervene as a peacemaker. When a nationalistic objection was raised by the French delegation to the application of a procedure suited to an immediate repres- sion of the traffic in women and children, their pretension met with a decisive rebuke from the Assembly, under British leadership. That they felt this to be an unpleasant &minutia capitis was made patent by their subsequent attitude in the disarmament question, which gave a welcome opportunity to Mr. Fisher to place once more in the forefront of the Assembly's desires that of beholding a complete moral reconciliation, ow
the floor of the House, of French and British sentiment in regard to the placing of Germany and France on an equal footing in the European concert which the League mainly exists to effectuate in the nearest future possible.
Lord Robert Cecil found an occasion for expressing his regret that no representative of the labouring classes, industrial and agricultural, sat in the Assembly. He felt this to involve some danger for the co-operation of the masses with the League, which would be the more valuable because the masses are now pervaded everywhere with a most profound horror for war. No one can doubt that therein lay a defect in the representative character of the Assembly, and a most regrettable one, because the avowed disarmament policy of the League finds it in its own precincts without an articulate expression.of support from the quarter which of all would be most emphatic in giving it. An understanding of the lesser States with the working classes throughout Europe for thwarting any future attempt at war on a large scale was foreshadowed by the Swedish delegate Branting, whose utterances were clothed in the authority of a forthcoming Socialistic Government in Sweden under his guidance.
This fourth week in the Assembly's deliberations again found the smaller, semi-neutral States to be the keenest amid the defenders of national sovereignty. It is apparent that they do not quite trust the composition of the Council. Their dis- trust is, for the present, mistaking the real situation. It would be impossible to find a Council whose members were more completely devoted than the present ones to the cause of peace. Much noted was in this respect the declaration by Sir Rennell Rodd that Switzerland was the right place to be the home of the League, owing to its long-established neutrality. It should not he omitted that the searching investigation which has taken Place of the purport of Article 10 tends to the weakening of the security it offered for the handling of the League by the prin- cipal allied European Powers. This, coming along with the rather insidious weakening of the blockade clause (Article 16), shows the Assembly to be receding from the original position of the Covenant-makers of 1919. It is moving towards a more ideally constructive conception of utility. The whole tone of the Assembly may be gathered from the words of Lord Robert Cecil, which closed the Saturday evening sitting : " One cannot effect moral reconciliation with material means."—I am,
Previous page
