The League of Nations
An Assembly Balance-Sheet
CN one point everyone in Geneva seems to be agreed— that the League of Nations Assembly, which as I write is in articulo mortis, has been remarkably and encouragingly successful. Those of us, indeed, now comparatively few, who have attended all eight of the Assemblies so far held, are inclined to give this last one the foremost place in the series.
There are several criteria of success. When the Assembly met, the discontent of the smaller nations had become serious. Whether they were right or wrong in thinking the Locarno Powers meant to take the running of the League into their own hands is not nearly so important as the fact that they did think so. The only remedy for the state of mind which that belief engendered was plain speech. If the small States had chosen to nurse their grievances in silence they would only have grown more dissatisfied still and lost most or all of their loyalty to the League. Instead of that they spoke out, in the approved Geneva manner. They made their • complaints frankly, and the Locarno Powers, in the persons of Sir Austen Chamberlain and M. Briand on the Assembly platform, and of Dr. Stresemann in an address to journalists, answered them. The Foreign Ministers incidentally defended what are known as " the hotel conversations "—but they held none of them during the month they were at Geneva.
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