UNDERSTANDING THE BRITISH POINT OF VIEW.
That has been one encouraging symptom. Another has been the steady swing from disunion to unity. At the end of the Assembly's first week Sir Austen Chamberlain's speech seemed to have driven a wedge between the British Empire and the rest of the delegates. That is not said in criticism of the speech. In point of fact those who praised the Foreign Secretary most warmly for his frankness realized fully what the first effect of that frankness on the Assembly must be and was. But the speech brought a double reaction. Some of the criticism it received here seems to have concentrated opinion in Great Britain behind the speaker and against his critics. In Geneva, on the other hand, there came an almost immediate recognition of the danger of hasty impressions and a growing resolve to understand the British attitude and bridge any gulf that might have opened. It is due to some of the Continental States to realize the advances they made towards agreement, in that an Assembly whose dominant characteristic has been the revelation of a continuing faith in the Geneva Protocol consented to carry unanimously a resolution on disarmament and security from which all mention of the Protocol was deliberately omitted. Lord Onslow was fully justified in declaring, in his speech of last Saturday, that rarely had a reconciliation of opposing views been more rapid, more sincere, or more complete.
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