The League of Nations
Memories of Lord Balfour at Geneva
THE fact that the Secretary-General and Deputy Secretary- General of the League of Nations should have made the journey. from Geneva to attend the Memorial Service to Lord Balfour at Westminster Abbey is notable testimony to the place that the leader of the British Delegation at the first three meetings of the Assembly holds in the history of the League.
That history is still short enough, but even after ten years the League of Nations has taken its place as so essential a factor in the mechanism of international relations that the doubts and difficulties of its early days have been a little forgotten, and forgotten with them, perhaps, the services rendered by the men from different countries who set the nascent body on its feet, saved it by their wisdom from mis- takes and fortified it by their faith against detractors.
Among those to whom the League owes that debt Lord Balfour was conspicuous. The First Assembly of the League in 1920 numbered few figures of international repute. Among those few the leader of the British Delegation was incomparably the most distinguished. He was one of the veterans of the Assembly in years and no one could approach him in the importance of the national and international services he had rendered. With Germany still absent and Italy not impres- sively represented the British and French Delegations dominated the Assembly. Lord Balfour and M. Leon Bourgeois, another veteran with an honourable record in one particular ' field, naturally took the lead. Benes claims mention too, but his sun was just rising while theirs were, of necessity, beginning to set.
Lord Balfour's appointment to Geneva awakened some doubts in the first instance. He had, it is true, been Foreign Minister for a time, but it was during the War, when foreign affairs cut their own channels and brooked little direction from anyone. He had had no part at the Peace Conference in shaping the Covenant. He held only a sinecure office in the Cabinet. And the question whether he really believed in the League of Nations rose inevitably to many lips.
I am not sure whether the First Assembly and the various Council meetings which Lord Balfour had attended before then as British delegate supplied a completely satisfying answer to that question. Any public duty that he had to discharge was invariably discharged conscientiously and with high ability, but what the League needed in its first experi- mental years in a profoundly sceptical world was some striking demonstration of faith in it by men whose words carried weight. To that faith Lord Balfour gave expression at the Second • Assembly rather than at the First. He had been watching the League judicially as well as taking his active share in its labours. Like many younger men, whose minds might he expected to be more pliable, he grew steadily and progres- sively into the spirit of the League, and increasingly sensible of its possibilities. At the First Assembly his principal speech was notable for a passage which seemed to imply doubt as to the value and wisdom of public discussion. Someone raised the question of mandates, and Lord Balfour took the line that that question was entrusted to the League Council alone, and that the Assembly had no due ground for discussing it, a theory which was effectively demolished by the speaker's kinsman, Lord Robert Cecil, then sitting in unchartered freedom as delegate for South Africa. It was at that Assembly, too, that Lord Balfour, in common with M. Bourgeois, suc- ceeded in excluding from the statutes of the new Court of International Justice a provision by which all suitable cases, instead of, only those which both parties agreed to refer to it, should go automatically to the Court. That decision is being slowly and laboriously reversed to-day by a succession of individual signatures of the Optional Clause.
Perhaps by accident, but I think personally by something quite other than accident, the Second and Third Assemblies revealed a different Lord Balfour. Two passages in his speeches in those years I have always remembered—and what lodges Spontaneously in the memory is generally best worth recalling. One was an unqualified declaration of faith in the League as its Assembly met for the second time at Geneva. the other, at. the Third Assembly, was a necessary warning against discouragement, based on a reminder of the unlooked- for handicaps the League had had to face. " Remember," said the British delegate, " that the founders of the League con- ceived that they were setting up a machinery to preserve a peace which the founders of the League imagined they had established." The founders of the League were the peace- makers at Paris in 1919. If their work had not gone awry the League would have had simply to maintain peace in a pacified world. Instead of that it was battling for its life in a Europe racked still not merely by suspicions and hatreds, but by the actual clash of arms.
To realize that was essential to a just estimate of the League's success and failure. It was a reminder, moreover, that came from one who had shown himself by this time a convinced believer both in the League's capacity as well as in its aims. A year earlier, at the Second Assembly in 1921, just when such an affirmation was most timely, Lord Balfour had passed in swift review the work accomplished by the League, as disclosed in the report submitted to the Assembly by the Secretary- General. The British Delegate, summarized some of these achievements and pointed simply to the index of the report—. the list of the subjects which it dealt with—and he ended his speech by inviting any man who read that index to ask himself one question—" Were the League of Nations abolished to- morrow, what body either exists or could be found which could do these things ? If he asks himself that one question I will answer for him that he will get up from the perusal of this table of contents a convinced and lifelong supporter of our work." Merely an effective peroration ? Perhaps, if it stood alone. Perhaps, if private cynicism belied public professions. But with Lord Balfour the public and the private verdicts on the League were identical. I have heard him at a social gathering at Geneva, where a light after-luncheon speech from him was looked for, diverge unexpectedly into an appreciation, expressed in tones of profound conviction, of the bond of comradeship which linked all who found themselves united in " this greatest of all endeavours for the welfare of humanity," and I remember an appeal, unlooked for and quite unrequired by the occasion, to a body of journalists with whom he was dining during the Second or Third Assembly to remem- ber how high a responsibility they bore in portraying and interpreting the League to the world. I recall, too, the eager- ness with which, after he had himself ceased to be a delegate, he enquired how one of his successors had been impressed by Geneva " because the atmosphere is so extraordinary that I sometimes almost distrust it."
But no one who watched Lord Balfour steering the Conven- tion on Women and Children to a safe anchorage in the face of fierce French attack in 1921—a contest into which he threw himself surprisingly and gratuitously, partly out of sheer love of forensic battle and partly in defence of a constitutional principle which underlay the whole discussion—or knew what unsparing toil the work of the Committee on the Austrian Reconstruction Scheme in 1922 involved, will ever suggest that Lord Balfour went to Geneva simply to deliver speeches. As Chairman of the Austrian Committee the British Delegate bore the brunt of the burden involved in carrying through a scheme which has done more for the League's prestige in the economic field than any other it has ever taken up, and when the Austrian Chancellor, Dr. Seipel, rose in the Assembly with his historic ejaculation, " Thank God we can say to-day the League of Nations has not failed us," it was at Lord Balfour's door more than at any other that the tribute was laid.
Reminiscences are not judgments. They only help to provide the material for judgments. What Lord Balfour did for the League of Nations cannot be precisely estimated or accurately measured. Nor what the League of Nations did for him. His international career began at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and ended at Geneva in the third decade of the twentieth century., No one recognized more fully than Lord Balfour himself how auspicious for the world had been the transition from the diplomatic methods of his youth to those
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