The League of Nations

What the Tenth Assembly Was and Did

THE Tenth Assembly of the League of Nations has ended its labours this week. What, it is natural to ask, was the outcome of its deliberations, and how will the world be the better for them ? The answer may be given in the apostolic words, " Much every way." The Assembly was, in the first place, a landmark in itself, for there is commonly considered to be some special virtue in tens and multiples of ten. Occasion, moreover, was taken to lay the foundation-stone of the League's new permanent buildings, and the acquisition of this enduring habitation creates an agreeable sensation of stability.

INITIATIVE AND CONSOLIDATION.

That sensation, fortunately, corresponds to facts. If the Tenth Assembly is to be summed up in a sentence it may be said to have been an assembly of initiative and consolidation. The opinion, indeed, is likely to be unanimous among those who have known the League since the members of its First Assembly gathered in November mists in 1920 that never has the general Parliament of the League shown such virility and promise as in 1929. So varied and extensive are the projects it has launched that the Secretariat, enthusiastic as it is in the service of the League, is viewing with consterna- tion the mass of work accumulated for it by. Assembly resolutions.

THE BRITISH DELEGATION.

That is partly the result of discussions in past years. Old proposals, thrashed out in debate, reported on by experts, considered at length by Governments, happen to have come to fruition now. But it is partly, too, and for the major part, the result of the new British Government's zest for achievement. The British delegation has been untiring. It has struck out into no new waters, but wherever it has found a task begun it has made it its business to get it finished. From the British alone have emanated resolutions which are to lead in the next few months to a conference on what is commonly called a tariff truce ; to a conference on the manufacture of narcotic drugs ; to committee-study of the working of the League Secretariat ; to committee-study of an amendment to the Covenant to bring that document into harmony with the Kellogg Pact ; to new discussions of the whole question of land disarmament in the Preparatory Com- mission. If equal zeal were displayed by only three or four of the other delegations the Assembly would either collapse from intellectual surfeit or be kept sitting for the next few months.

But in fact the British Delegation happened to be making itself the mouthpiece of opinions widely shared, not merely plunging into the unknown on its own account, and most of the ideas that were in the air were brought down by it to solid earth and presented in the form of definite resolutions. It was hardly a question of a single delegation arriving with a wallet full of innovations from its own capital. But the upshot of it all is that the League has before it a year of unprecedented activity that will strain its singularly efficient mechanism to the utmost.

GENERAL TENDENCIES.

Of these individual projects, such as the movement to stabilize tariffs and the new attempt to limit the outflow of narcotics by agreement between the countries where manufacture takes place, there will be other opportunities of speaking. Here it is more to the purpose to underline certain general tendencies to which the Tenth Assembly gave expres- sion. The most general of all, and perhaps the most important, is the development by the Assembly of a new confidence in it- self. It has stood revealed this year as a body that does things, not merely talks. The smaller Powers in particular, who have always had plenty of ideas, have been immensely encouraged by seeing those ideas put forward with all the weight and influ- ence of a Great Power behind them. The fact that more Foreign Ministers attended the Assembly than ever before testified to the conviction practical men had of its indispensability as

an organ of world affairs. The League was more in tne centre of the world-stage at the Assembly of 1929 than ever before.

SOUTH AMERICA.

Another tendency, less general perhaps, but very nearly as wide as the world, was the new concentration of distant continents at Geneva. Of that there were many demonstra- tions. From Latin America came three States whose seats in the Assembly had stood vacant for years—Bolivia, Peru and Honduras. It is true they were not major States. The absence of Argentina, Brazil and Mexico is so serious as almost to counteract the presence of all the rest. But still the flow is in the right direction; and it is a flow that was not manifest at all till this Assembly. Bolivia said publicly that her return was largely due to the prudent, but firm, action of the League— terrors of the Monroe doctrine notwithstanding—during her dispute with Paraguay at the end of 1928, and before the Assembly ended the Bolivian and Paraguayan delegates figuratively embraced one another on the Assembly platform. Bolivia, moreover, clinched her return by seeking from the League that practical co-operation it exists to furnish—help in organizing a sanitary service in her country.

THE UNITED STATES.

Even the United States had its place on the Assembly stage this year. We have travelled far from the days when the State Department at Washington declined to so much as answer League communications. Now it sends its official representatives to Geneva to take part in League conferences and committees and signs and ratifies the conventions that emerge therefrom. There was legitiinate applause when it was announced last week that the State Department had just deposited with the Secretary-General the United States' ratification of the convention on export and import prohibi- tions. This is worth mentioning rather for its symbolic value than for its importance in itself, though that is by no means negligible. The Assembly further took with satisfaction all the steps needed on its side towards bringing the United States into the Permanent Court of International Justice as full member. The League has now approved the desired formula and it only remains for the Senate of the United States to do the same.

ASIA.

The same spirit of consolidation extended to Asia. The Indian delegation for the first time was headed by an Indian, not by a former Viceroy or Provincial Governor. That is of substantial advantage at Geneva, and of much greater advan- tage in India itself, and it is to be hoped there will be no reversion to the old unsatisfactory plan. But much more critical than the position of India in relation to the League is the position of China. A year ago it was doubtful in the extreme whether a Chinese delegation would be seen in the Assembly again. This year, as things turned out, the Nanking Government sent to Geneva the strongest delegation that ever came from China. It sent it with its League subscription in its pocket, and it sent it to ask for the assistance of the League in organizing various medical services in China—assistance which was, of course, immediately forthcoming. China; moreover, raised most wisely and legitimately the question of the revision of obsolete or inapplicable treaties under Article XIX of the Covenant, an action which, though taken in her own particular interests, is in fact of considerable service to the League.

M. BRIAND'S PROPOSAL.

Against this background of general concentration must be examined M. Briand's proposal of a special concentration in Europe. That may be the Assembly's main preoccupation next year. This year it has had preoccupations enough, and if half of the projects now floated come to port 1980 is likely to be the League's most fruitful year.

YOUR GENEVA CORRESPONDENT.