The League of Nations

How the Covenant Became What It is

EVERY historian worthy of the name gets back when he can to original sources. There have been various historians already of the birth and early days of the League of Nations, and there will be more in the future. The latter are happier in one respect than the former, for they have just had made available to them a mass of material such as not one of their predecessors could command. Dr. David Hunter Miller's two massive volumes (The Drafting of the Covenant, Putnams, 63s.) tell everything anyone is ever likely to tell, and every- thing anyone is ever likely to want to know, about those concentrated discussions in Colonel House's room at the Hotel Crillon in Paris in 1919, out of which the League of Nations Covenant emerged.

Dr. Miller himself was the legal adviser to the American Peace Delegation. Sir Cecil Hurst, then Mr. C. J. B. Hurst, held a similar position in the British Delegation. As far as the actual work of drafting goes, those two men were respon- sible for the. Covenant. It was on a document prepared by them jointly, and known throughout • as the Hurst-Miller Draft, that the Covenant discussions were based. But behind them, of course, stood their principals, President Wilson and Colonel House in the one case, Lord Robert Cecil (as he then was) and General Smuts in the other. There were seventeen other members of the Commission that drafted the Covenant, but Wilson and Cecil dominated it.. Dr. Miller, as Wilson's immediate adviser, was familiar with the change of every dot and every comma in every draft, and to his first volume of narrative he has added a second volume almost super- abundantly replete with proposals, amendments and alter- native texts.

The latter can be left for historians of the future to deal with. The former is much too interesting to leave at all, for the light it casts on the aims and expectations of the various men and the various nations whose influence shaped the Covenant enables us to form an estimate far more intelli- gently critical than would otherwise be possible of what the Covenant's value actually is to-day.

Three main strains ran through the discussions—a British, an American and, to a less extent, a French. Other- States were occasionally prominent, as, for example, when the Japanese pressed forcibly and with tact for a declaration on racial equality, which everyone knew was just, but which Britain and America could not concede because of Australian and Californian opinion. Wilson and Cecil opposed it as men discharging a disagreeable task. They voted in a minority against it, but the proposal was lost because unanimity was needed.

But very largely the story of the Covenant discussions is the story of what Wilson and Cecil said. The President's °biter dicta are often as interesting in retrospect as his more considered declarations. Speaking, for example, of the need for flexibility in an Article on territorial guarantees, he observed that " it is conceivable that Canada might some time wish to become a part of the United States." Discussing privately with his own delegation the prospects at Paris, he remarked that " the men whom we were about to deal with did not represent their own people "—an example of that tendency to appeal to peoples over the heads of their Governments which proved disastrous during the Fiume crisis of the coming April. In the same discussion with his colleagues he threw out the idea that the German colonies should be declared the common property of the League and administered by small nations. He tried to solve the still

insoluble problem of the modification of territorial settle- ments, and he put his own declarations about open diplomacy

in right proportion by insisting that the opening meetings, at any rate, of the Commission on the League should be secret, in order that he might be free to change his own mind if he chose, and not be bound, by what he might have said at a previous meeting.

Turn now to Cecil's views. They were, no doubt, less his own than Wilson's were Wilson's, for the principles of the future League had been more systematically thought out in England than in America, and Lord Robert had the findings of the Phillimore Committee behind him. But the League he was then arguing for differed rather notably from the League of to-day. He foresaw an Assembly meeting quad- riennially, and a Council normally only once a year. That Council he would have had composed of Great Powers alone, a proposal which drew from M. Hymans, of Belgium, the bitter observation that " what you are proposing is simply the Holy Affiance." He would have had the Permanent Court of Justice established not at The Hague but at Geneva, and he observed in an interesting parenthesis that Great Britain would probably send to the Assembly " one of the leaders of the Labour Party, a representative of religious interests and, I hope, a woman." As things have worked out, it is only the woman that has maintained a regular place in British delegations.

One other British contribution calls for mention as being prophetic of much that has happened since. The British Admiralty put in a Memorandum described by Dr. Miller as " unsympathetic" regarding Article VIII. of the Covenant, which deals with the limitation of armaments. The crux of it is a paragraph constituting so direct a challenge to all the League of Nations stands for that it seems worth quoting even now :—

" Further, the acceptance of the proposal for limitation of arms, ments entails a serious constitutional consequence which the Admiralty, Army Council and Air Council cannot accept without the strongest protest—namely, the abrogation of their constitutional duty of advising their Government as to the strength of their Naval, Military and Air Forces."

It is obvious that the acceptance of this principle would put an end to any possibility of armament limitation by agreement through the League.

Now for the French contribution. The French delegates; M. Leon Bourgeois and M. Larnaude, took a prominent and often a useful part in the discussions, but the French thesis

summed itself up in one insistent principle—that the League of Nations must be equipped with an international force, and

failing that, with an international general staff. Its defenders were beaten by Wilson and Cecil, but not till Cecil, after appealing in vain for the abandonment of the French pro- posals, had warned M. Bourgeois frankly that to press them

might mean wrecking the League of Nations and that the alternative to the League would be an Anglo-American alliance. Ultimately the French gave way, but military considerations were always foremost in their minds, and they only accepted the mandate principle on the understanding that France should be allowed to raise volunteers in her mandate territories for purposes of defence. It was supposed by everyone at the time that this meant for the defence of the territories in question., but at the end of everything, when what was supposed to be the final draft of the Covenant was printed, the French text of the Mandate Article, unlike the English, was found to authorise the military training of natives for " the defence of the territory and of the territory of the mother-country." President Wilson was furious and the words were taken out, but two or three years later, when

the actual mandates for the French Cameroons were drafted, a phrase embodying the French views was none the less inserted.

One other French aberration, though obviously not approved by the whole of the French delegation, is now merely an amusing reminiscence. Pichon, then French Foreign Minister, at the Plenary Session of the Peace Conference when the Covenant was finally adopted, proposed that Monaco should be invited to join the League. Dr. Miller describes the incident

thus : " When Pichon brought forward the proposal, Clemen- ceau seemed surprised. Pichon turned and said deferentially : I only make the proposal if nobody objects.' Clemenceau

rather brutally answered, ' You know that everybody objects:, This appears in the Protocol as un echangc de vises entre

M. Pichon et le Presitlent. "

So in the end the Covenant became what, apart from one or two later amendments at Geneva, the Covenant is to-day H. WiLsoN HARRIS.