THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS ASSEMBLY.
(To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECT►TOR."]
Sia,—The second assembly of the League of Nations brought its proceedings to a close on Wednesday, October 5th. The signifi- cance o' the last three days of its activity remains to be gauged. Certain oscillations showed anxiety to tread warily the path of progress by avoiding to overstep, and yet reaching fully, the limits of the powers of the League's parliament. The United States from the outside and France from within (the latter is a highly- centralized State) would rather it did not stretch forth its arms to undue lengths, either over the humanitarian field allotted to it, or into political matters hitherto reserved for purely national management. There is in both those quarters an audible murmur of jealousy that the Assembly claims to submit, in the shape of fully drafted con- ventions, some of its resolutions to the member-States, and others. Even without looking beyond the pale of the League there is room for gradual adjustment, on the one hand between the Assembly and the Council; on the other hand between the Governments and the League as an international agency betwixt them. The powers of the League stand in a relation of continuity with their origin. Though, in formal aspect, they derive from the Covenant; their actual force proceeds from the States which have contractually entered upon the Covenant. Hence a necessity to keep in line with those fifty-one States showed itself the more as the Assembly went more deeply to work. In this respect, the object of its last sittings has been to express the results of its scrutiny of the articles of the Covenant.
On closer inspection, as could be expected, the Covenant has proved itself to be a rather rough and ready framework for a constitution which, to be workable, has yet to be hewn out bit by bit from the material provided. Unable to recast the Covenant single-handed, the Assembly has tentatively refor- mulated nearly half its twenty-six articles on some point or other, for the attention of the Council, with a view to a decision in the next Assembly. The proposed amendments bring such qualifications to the summary original wordings that the Assembly seems to have referred them to the Council as a protest against its own boldness.
The hard fact subsists that some articles are net fit for practical application as they stand. We have already, in a previous letter, spoken of Article 10 and Article 16. To those should now be added Article 18, concerning the registration of treaties at the Secretariats of the League and their publication. The application of Article 18 has broken down in this, that financial and military clauses in " regional agreements con- ducive to the maintenance of peace," as the Covenant has it, are being withheld by the parties to them. The withholding of those clauses from the League has a double bearing : one upon bond-fide membership, and the other upon the investigation of armaments, reciprocally within the League (Article 8). There
is also the fundamental Wilsonian proposition : no people shall be pledged to war without its knowledge. Yet the Assembly did not define the position of the offending States. The massive Anglo-Saxon vote of six delegations (British Empire, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India) was none the less one that made itself happily felt in those debates.
The backbone of the Covenant runs along Articles 10, 16, 18 and 21. All were attacked. The Assembly accordingly set up a form in which to present to the contracting Powers its pro- posals for bringing the amendments within the meaning of Article 26, upon which it has come to an understanding this year. From this procedure it has excepted Article 10, any alteration of which it now thinks untimely, though some dele- gates made great efforts to clear up the huge misunderstanding that exists behind the obvious, yet erroneous, meaning attach- ing to that article. A reference to the history of its making shows that President Wilson proposed it in a form which did not grant an absolute and perpetual guarantee to the then existing, or then established, territorial frontiers and internal political conditions. He left the door open to territorial modifi- cations and internal political evolution. Deferring retrospec- tively to this view, the 6th Committee of the Assembly worded as follows an interpretative statement: " The object of Article 10 is not to perpetuate the territorial distribution and political organization as they were established or existed at the time of the recent treaties of peace. Changes may be effected by various legitimate methods, including even war, when the pacific methods provided by the Covenant have been exhausted. The Covenant admits this possibility." As we have said before, consideration of Article 10 was ultimately set aside.
To complete this survey, we have now to dwell upon Article 21 in so far as it describes euphemistically certain possible alliances and hegemonies as regional understandings for securing the maintenance of peace. We alluded to them in connexion with registration under Article 18. There is an appearance that Article 21 allows them without scrutiny. The Assembly was very sensitive on this point, and almost admitted that Article 21 might override Article 18. Those should take notice who wish that a tide of regional coalitions contrary to the spirit of the Covenant should not set in. The bringing up of such before the International Court of Justice, for examina- tion, though not in the inconclusive manner hinted at by Lord Robert Cecil, might be a remedy, helping on the substitution of the reign of law for the reign of power.
We would bring this third and last letter to a close with a most apposite quotation from Lord Robert Cecil. As the giant Antaeus lost his strength when uplifted from the earth, his mother, so the League must look to public opinion for its feet.
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