Correspondence
League of Nations Secretariat
DAME RACHEL CROWDY AND SIR ARTHUR SALTER.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—Everyone familiar with the League of Nations Secre- tariat would realize in a moment how serious a loss the League was sustaining if it were announced that either Sir Arthur Salter or Dame Rachel Crowdy was taking leave of Geneva to seek new outlets in new directions elsewhere. In point of actual fact it is not a case of losing either Sir Arthur or Dame Rachel, but both. The former is at this moment in India, giving his advice, still as a League official, on various financial questions at the request of the Government. When that mission is discharged Sir Arthur's formal association with Geneva will be at an end. Dame Rachel Crowdy marks her new liberty by entering on a short lecture tour in the United States early in February.
It is a pure accident that the two principal British members of the Secretariat, apart from the Secretary-General, should be leaving at the same time. Sir Arthur Salter is resigning from no other motive than the desire to devote himself for a period to literary work, but a world that needs all the men of first-class talent it can find is unlikely to leave him long to his seclusion. And Sir Arthur has shown himself too good a public servant for close on thirty years to be capable of treating a call to further service as summarily as he is known to have treated a host of lucrative offers that have rained in on him since his intention to leave Geneva became known.
It must be left to some dispassionate historian of the future to estimate what the League owes to Sir Arthur. His part— the predominant part—in the evolution of enterprises like the Austrian and Hungarian Reconstruction Schemes and the Greek and Bulgarian Refugee- Schemes is common know- ledge. What is less generally known is the role his personality has played in the inner counsels of the Secretariat and in the informal discussions of delegates to League Councils and Assemblies. For Sir Arthur's political wisdom is in no way inferior to his technical ability—and in the latter field, if technical ability means a combination of the creative mind with the executive hand, there are not a dozen men in Europe to equal him. An example of the British Civil Servant at his best, but with an outlook widened by a natural largeness of vision as well as by the experience garnered in the last twelve years at Paris and Geneva, he has done more perhaps than anyone else living to set a standard of what the ideal
international man" (that creation so myopically fore- shadowed in a recent Geneva report as a still unrealized development of the future) should be. That in itself is a considerable service to render to the League in the days of its adolescence.
But Sir Arthur has done more than set a standard ; he has started a tradition. Disquiet at his departure from Geneva is mitigated by knowledge of the capacity of the men he has first discovered and then trained. It is true he is always losing them—Quesnay to the Bank of France, and thence to the Bank of International Settlements, Jacobsson to the National Economic Council in Sweden, and so on—but that is because when men of ability are needed in this country or that the shortest way to get them is to plunder Salter's staff. Fortunately, Mr. Arthur Loveday, who now takes over the financial side at Geneva, and Signor Stoppani, who becomes head of the economic, are well steeped in the Salter tradition and the divided mantle falls in each case on shoulders of proved competence.
Dame Rachel's sphere at Geneva• has been different. As head of the Social Section, under which the Opium Question and the Protection of Women and Children have till now been incongruously associated, Dame Rachel has had her full share of administrative work (no new experience to her, incidentally, as commandant of the V.A.D.'s in France and Belgium), and the so-called White Slave Traffic Convention of 1921, the Geneva Opium Convention of 1925 and the investigation into the traffic in women, first in Europe and America and now in the Far East, are landmarks of her term
of office. But the principal woman official of the League cannot confine herself to a merely departmental role. The League at any rate would have been substantially the poorer if Dame Rachel had failed to respond to the larger demands made on her. The interest displayed by women as women in the League of Nations is not a factor the League can afford to disregard. Women's influence the world over is a powerful force, and to women both as individuals and as members of various humanitarian organizations the social work of the League has always made a special appeal. That interest Dame Rachel Crowdy has steadily and success- fully fostered. That she has had the will to do it is much— for it is a purely extra-official function—but the will is only one of many qualities combined in a personality capable in a remarkable degree of making converts without an effort of evangelism. Dame Rachel has always been, for reasons obvious enough to all who know her, one of the figures whom visitors to Geneva remember best. It has fallen to her to symbolize for a period, beyond anyone else, the place of woman in the League structure, and the League may be congratulated on the impression its first woman Chief of Section has created. If Dame Rachel Crowdy had been merely an efficient departmental head and nothing more she would have given to the League what she contracted to give, but Geneva would have missed half, or more than half, of what it has in fact gained from her ten years of service.— I am, Sir, dm., YOUR GENEVA CORRESPONDENT.
P.S.—Since this letter was written the very important announcement has been made that Sir Arthur Salter has accepted an invitation extended to him by the Chinese Govern- ment to visit Nanking and advise on financial and economic reconstruction in China.
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