The League of Nations
The League Council and Some Hard Problems
MANY PROBLRMS.
• Day to day activity at Geneva never ceases. That is obvious enough as regards the Secretariat itself, but it is almost equally true of the conferences and committees that seem to follow one another nowadays in unbroken succession. The Arbitra- tion and Security Committee ran straight on to the Council date and past. it. The Council itself has just completed its 'crowded week, and now with only three days' intermission we have the Disarmament Commission in full swing, with the Russian total disarmament proposals in the limelight. After that come Women and Children's Committees, the Opium Committee and another Economic Conference in little in the .shape of the first meeting of the new Economic Consultative Committee of nearly fifty members. And so on through the dog days right up till the Assembly in September.
Tun RUMA.NO-HUNGARIAN DISPUTE.
- But, for the moment, . last week's Council is the thing. It was a quiet Council as things go,.if indeed any gathering can be called quiet at which protagonists like M. Titulesco and Count Apponyi confront each other across the table. Volumes have been written- on the Rtunano-Hungarian dispute about the Optants and there are possibly six men somewhere in the universe who really understand it. But for the League it presents with all its complications certain issues (among others) as simple as they are important. Above all things, is there ever a case and, if so, is this a case, when the letter of the law should be overruled in some broader interest ? The Peace Treaty said that Hungarian Optants in Rumania- Optants being Hungarians. in the districts transferred to Rumania who preferred to move into Hungary and 'remain Hungarians—should be allowed to retain their landed property, i.e., not have it sold ñp and'credited to the reparation account like Hungarians elsewhere hi Rumania.
THE AGRARIAN REFORM SCHEME.
But could that mean that Hungarians were to be exempt from the operation of the general agrarian reform scheme, whereby the great estates, whether Rumanian or Hungarian, were broken up and given' to the peasants ? If the Hungarians were thus exempted, they would, as defeated ex-enemies, be given a position of privilege above Rumanians themselves and the whble agrarian reform scheme might break down, since you could not apply harsher measures to Rumanians than to Hungarians. That, coupled with the claim that the agrarian reform scheme alone saved Rumania and, indeed, most of Eastern Europe from Bolshevism, was the Rumanians' case. It has throughout impressed the Council, which up to this month had declined to comply with the Hungarian request and reconstitute the Rumano-Hungarian mixed 'tribunal of three members (one Hungarian, one Rumanian, one neutral) which the Rumanians have paralysed by with- drawing their judge whenever a claim by an Optant is down for hearing.
M. TITULESCO'S REFUSAL.
Last September the Council proposed thAt the Rumanians should replace their judge, on condition of the Hungarians accepting certain principles of law regarding Optant cases. Hungary, however, resolutely refused assent to the principles, which the Council had ao power to impose. This time Sir Austen Chamberlain, as rapporteur on the question, has tried Another tack, proposing that the Rumanians should put back their judge and that two neutral judges should be added, thus making a tribunal of five, predominantly neutral, for the Optant cases. This time Hungary accepted, but Rumania refused unless the two new judges were to be bound by the legal principles of September which Hungary had already rejected. , The Council was solid. Rumania was stubborn. Sir Austen's appeal to X. Titulesco was weighty, M. Briand's impressive and almost emotional. Dr. Stresemann took as strong a line as his two colleagues. But Titulesco, a master
of debate, yielded not one inch. Under such conditiona the Council had exhausted its possibilities. Not being a super-State it cannot impose a decision even by unanimity on- an unwilling disputant. The question is adjourned till June in the hope that in the interval the Rumanian Govern- ment, as a whole, may make the decision its representative at Geneva could not take responsibility for, and accept the Chamberlain proposal.
THE AFFAIR OF TEE MACHINE-GUNS.
Hungary, it so happened, was very much in the picture on another count. The affair of the machine-gun parts seized in transit on the Austro-Hungarian frontier at St. Gotthard had made an astonishing stir throughout Eastern Europe. Lift, boys in Budapest broach the subject eagerly to visitors while they are hoisting them from the ground floor to the fourth. The question of the action to be taken by the League, now responsible for supervising the execution of the Disarmament Clauses of the Peace Treaties, was for obvious reasons - matter of vital concern to France and Germany (from different points of view) as well as to the Little Entente States, which had brought the matter up in the form of a veiled eharge against Hungary. The Council had no easy task. It met more than two months after the seizure of the material and the facts were sufficiently known to make a detailed investi- gation largely superfluous. No great impropriety on the part of the Hungarian authorities could be demonstrated, and the suspicion that the weapons in question were really intended for the Hungarian Government itself and were not, as the waybill professed to show, merely on their way through from Italy to Warsaw, was hardly susceptible of solid proof. M. Briand put some searching questions across the table, to which the Hungarian representative, M. Tanczos, replied with much suavity, observing, inter die, that if the Arms Traffic Convention had been generally ratified this incident could never have arisen. The Council deputed three of its members to pursue the matter further, but, as was obvious, they could not report within the week, and this question, like that of the Optants, will come up again in June.
THE REemssraucrrox LOANS.
For the rest, the most. important matters on the agenda concerned reconstruction. Bulgaria, where the Refugee Settlement Scheme makes satisfactory progress, is to get League support for another loan—of £4,500,000—mainly to establish the banking system on sounder foundations and develop railway communications. The Portuguese Loan nego- tiations, on the other hand, have so far not matured though prolonged consideration was given to the application. The Bulgarian and the Portuguese schemes well illustrate the principles on which the League Financial Committee works. Its business is to see to it that a loan plan is so sound financially that it will create the necessary confidence in the mind of the investor who puts up the money. In the case of Bulgaria, what was needed was to remove the National Bank from all political influence, and - the negotiations hung fire till the Government finally agreed to meet the Committee's require- ments in that regard. In the case of Portugal all went well till the Financial Committee made the necessary stipulation that a League Commissioner should reside at Lisbon to authorize payments under the loan as he was satisfied that the Government was expending it for the purposes agreed on. This the Portuguese regarded as an affront to their dignity, though the provision has been an essential feature of the previous Austrian, Hungarian, Greek, and Bulgarian loans, and the matter therefore stands over for the present. It is not a matter of essential importance to the League whether Portugal gets a loan or not, but it is absolutely vital that there should be no lowering of those financial standards which have made League backing an asset of material value in the money markets of the world.—I am, Sir, &e.,
YOUR GENEVA CORRESPONDENT.
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