The League of Nations

How the Covenant Became What It Is

ONLY the assumption, not necessarily warranted by facts, that the framers of the League of Nations Covenant were completely omniscient would justify the belief that the Covenant as it stands is the best of all Covenants the wit of man could conceive. However that may be, it is not the only possible Covenant. Its framers at Paris in 1919 took certain decisions. They might just as well have taken different decisions. They did, in fact, discuss different decisions and for reasons good or bad rejected them, coming down finally in each case in favour of the conclusions actually embodied in the now famous document which forms the basis of the being and activity of the League.

As IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN.

Not unnaturally, the proposals finally approved have been remembered and the proposals discarded have been forgotten. That, from some points of view, is a pity, for the League as a whole, and the Covenant in particular, are made more com- prehensible by a study of the provisions that were rejected, together with the reasons for their rejection, as well as of the provisions that were accepted, together with the reasons for their acceptance. Unfortunately the matter for such study has hitherto been inaccessible to most English readers. Much of it, however, is now made available in a volume, The Origins of the League Covenant (Hogarth Press, 10s. 6d.), prepared by Miss Florence Wilson, till lately Librarian of the League Secretariat at Geneva.

THE PARIS DEBATES.

The documents collected consist of the hitherto unpub- lished Minutes of the League of Nations Commission at the Peace Conference, presided over by President Wilson, together with various drafts—one French, one Italian, one British, one Scandinavian, and two (by Lord Robert Cecil and General Smuts) personal—out of which the Covenant in its final form was evolved. There is all the material here for discovering what the League might have been, and would have been if various people or various nations had had their way. The raw material of the Covenant, indeed, was even more extensive than that, for the British Foreign Office Committee, presided over by Lord Phillimore in 1918, summarizes all the main previous projects for a world League from " Sully's Grand Design " downwards, while an appendix by Lord Phillimore himself reviews a series of twentieth-century proposals, of which the most important are those of Lord Bryce.

THE PHILLIMORE REPORT.

The Phillimore Committee's report is a highly important document, for it must be regarded as the main basis of the Covenant in its final form. That is made clear enough not only from internal evidence but from President Wilson's own account of the position on January 21st, 1919, just before the first meeting of the Peace Conference Commission to draft a League Covenant was held. The situation, as described by the President to the Supreme Council on the date mentioned, was that " he had received the Phillimore Report, which had been amended by Colonel House and rewritten by himself. He had again revised it after having received General Smuts's draft and Lord Robert Cecil's Reports. It was, therefore, a compound of various suggestions. He had already seen M. Bourgeois (France), with whom he found himself to be in substantial accord on principles. He had also discussed his draft with Lord Robert Cecil and General Smuts and they had found themselves very near together."

MILITARY SANCTIONS FORESEEN.

So far as the Phillimore proposals were ultimately embodied in the Covenant they call for little notice here, but certain features which for one reason or another disappeared are worth some attention. At a moment when the military sanctions contemplated under Article XVI. of the existing Covenant are a good deal under criticism in various quarters in Great Britain, it is interesting to observe that Article II. of the Phillimore Draft, signed by such trusted and orthodox representatives of the Foreign Office as the late Sir Eyre Crowe, Sir William Tyrrell, and Sir Cecil Hurst, provides in even more uncom- promising language for the application of military sanctions, the main provision in this article reading :-

" If, which may God avert, one of the Allied States should break the covenant contained in the preceding Article [i.e., a covenant not to go to war without submitting a dispute to ihe processes of peaceful settlement] this State will become ipso facto at war with the other Allied States, and the latter agree to take and to support each other in taking jointly and severally all such measures—military, naval. financial, and economic--as will best avail for restraining the breach of covenant."

A WAR-TIME LEAGUE.

The phrase " Allied States " in this connexion, it may be observed, denotes merely States allied in the proposed League, not necessarily the Allies of the War then still in progress. But to some of the Covenant framers the League was, in fact, to be, in the first instance at any rate, a League purely of the Allies, and so it might most unfortunately have been had not President Wilson and Lord Robert Cecil combined to insist on the immediate admission of such neutrals as cared to join and the ultimate admission of enemy Powers themselves. It having been so decided, the views of the neutrals were heard in the interval between the production of the first draft of the Covenant and its final incorporation in the Treaty of Versailles.

THE FRENCH Porsrr OF VIEW.

Apart from individual differences of opinion, there were, of course, broad distinctions between national points of view, the most notable case of that being the French attitude re- garding the creation of an international army to carry out the behests of the League. The French Draft was specific on this point. One section of it was headed Military Sanctions, with the subheadings : 1. International Forces ; 2. Strength of National Contingents ; 3. Permanent Staff ; 4. Functions of the Permanent Staff ; 5. Commander-in-Chief and Chief of General Staff. The French conception was coloured obviously by the Foch tradition and the ideas prevailing naturally at the time the draft was signed, namely, June, 1918, when the Germans were still in maximum occupation of French soil. The League, according to this conception, would have become quite definitely a war instrument, though the French would, no doubt, argue with some justice that to invest it with those weapons would be the best possible way of ensuring that the weapons would never need to be used. The fight over this provision was prolonged, for the French held their ground with pertinacity, but once again the Anglo-Saxon combina- tion triumphed and all that remains of the international army in the Covenant is Article IX., which creates a Permanent Advisory Commission of naval and military experts to advise the Council on technical questions in those spheres.

THE COVENANT TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW.

On the whole the wisdom of the framers of the Covenant commends itself after an interval of nine years. Battles that might have been lost (like that with the British Dominions, who objected violently to the Mandate system) were, in fact, won. Proposals, such as that of the British delegation, to include in the Covenant provision for freedom of conscience and religion were, perhaps wisely, rejected, though in the countries where such protection is needed most provision is made for it in the various Minority Treaties. There may be trouble yet over the specific mention and approval of the Monroe Doctrine, to which an Argentine delegate took strong exception at Geneva a few months ago. And a perfectly otiose Article like that giving encouragement to the Red Cross might very well be allowed to drop out now.

But in the main a comparison between the League as the Covenant framers might have made it if they had decided otherwise than they did, and the League as it does in fact exist to-day, confirms the conviction that President Wilson and Lord Cecil, General Smuts, M. Bourgeois, M. Venizelos, and the rest did their work at Paris in 1919 both wisely and well. II. WILSON