The World in Council
ON the whole the world may be well satisfied by the acts and deliberations of the Council of the League of Nations which closed its latest session last Saturday and will again meet in conjunction with the Assembly next September. Just round the corner, so to speak, the European Commission of the League was sitting at different hours from those of the Council. Not many miles away at Bide, the Directors of the Bank for Inter- national Settlements were discussing international finance with the representatives of twenty-three Central Banks. And in London the Conference, called by Canada, of grain exporting countries was breaking the ice between its delegates and learning something of their particular views and difficulties.
In the Council there has been no hitch in the slow and ponderous steps taken towards the Disarmament Con- ference of next year. The Council confirmed the work and suggestions of the Preparatory Commission. We cannot . expect unanimity on the many complicated questions that are bound to arise there ; the methods of computing this or that, the inclusion or exclusion of reserves of men or munitions, and so on. We must rely to a great extent on good will, and if a nation wants to deceive its neighbours or colleagues, we must admit that it will probably succeed to some extent. Nine non- member States of the world are to be invited to send representatives. The Conference will have, in His Majesty's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, a shrewd and capable Chairman who will, if all goes well, preside regardless of whether he is then holding his present great office or not. Of other leaders Herr Curtius, helped no doubt by the sympathy of his colleagues, had a remarkable success as President, because more than once he had to combine the roles of impartial Chairman and advocate of a German cause ; yet no hostile criticism of his conduct disturbed the debates. Other business, of the now old- fashioned type arising from disputes, concerned Eastern Europe. Here the Council dealt gently with Poland in a dispute with Danzig, and more firmly with her in refusing to accept without reading it a report on what she had done to remedy conditions for her German-born citizens in those districts of Upper Silesia which are hers.
The European Commission " fed " the Council actively with plenty of business. For instance, it obtained approval of a scheme for an International Agricultural Mortgage Credit Company. The intention is that the Company should work with the B.I.S. under the League, and it is no new scheme fof helping to finance and sell Europe's crops. The Council decided to enlarge its Financial Committee by five nominated members with the especial purpose of advancing plans for the interven- tion of the League in facilitating the issue of international loans. We have some doubts about this anxiety to launch out spontaneously into finance. If finance can be put upon the shoulders of the B.I.S., as they grow broad and strong, just as matters demanding legal knowledge are sent to the Hague, the League will be able to give fuller and better attention to political matters in which it alone should often be the supreme authority. Another pro- posal of the European Commission that obtained approval was for the appointment of Committees to study several economic matters before the Assembly meets in Septem- ber. Among these we recognize subjects which have long been urged upon the League by the International Chamber of Commerce ; the general reduction of tariffs ; the classification of Customs nomenclature ; the transport of electric power ; and the disposal- of surplus wheat; This last subject has been discussed elsewhere. It is not surprising that the meeting of the London Confer- ence of wheat exporting countries has not solved the vast problems which were before it. Let us be thankful that it has not sought voluntary dissolution, committing suicide in front of such problems ; nor exploded through any friction generated within it. it has set up a Standing Committee which is to accumulate statistics and informa- tion for their governments ; and we hope that it will co-operate smoothly with the Committee at Geneva.
The most simple scheme suggested for dealing with the surplus stocks was the limitation of sowing for the next harvest. To this, however, the United States and Russia would give no assent. Nor would the United States accept the less simple scheme of agreed quota for the total exports of each country. We are therefore left for the present with no remedy before us except the old law of supply and demand. If no artificial regulations are made, this will work with its inexorable force, and drive corn land into other uses, until demand again exceeds supply and prices rise until they tempt the farmer to sow again. That is the true and tested method, and, like other manifesta- tions of the " higgling of the, market," it works more quickly and with more 'delicate precision than we ever expect them to work. But it entails inevitable hardship. And hardship is what our softer generation demands that governments should prevent. If they can, by all means let them, and let us all exert every effort to help. But governments have made it more difficult to help by having already made artificial regulations that interfere with free exchange and would circumvent natural and economic laws. For generations supply and demand have not freely decreed the growing of wheat either quantitatively or geo- graphically. Just as in England a century ago the Corn Laws sent up the price of wheat above 100s. a quarter, and we grew corn on bad or hungry land never designed by nature to bear a bounteous crop (and the poor starved in sight of that .expensive food), so now these exporting countries find, roughly speaking, that governments may have, for good reasons or bad, kept up the price of bread at home, but they cannot sell their surplus grain abroad. In some countries it is not wanted. In others it is sorely needed, but there is no gold wherewith to buy it, and gold is what the seller demands in exchange; or the hungry would-be buyer is barred by his government's tariffs from buying at a free price. One duty of the new Committee is to find means for " the greater utilization of wheat for food and otherwise." The Conference was doubtless thinking of human food, and food for beasts and poultry. There is one sphere in which wheat eating might be in- creased, a sphere so immense that if it could be seriously touched there would be no need to, seek for others yet : the, millions of hungry rice 'eaters in the East. We will not discuss the Indian problem now because she has long been an exporter and so complicated her problem. But the Japanese are eating more and more wheat. and flesh instead of rice. How soon could the Chinese acquire the taste and find the purchasing power to eat more wheat ? With her famine areas she cries aloud for Europe's, Australia's and America's surplus wheat.
There we must leave the matter, not happily, for we feel that these questions will take long to answer, and even as we write the economic laws are acting surely. Those mills grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small. But we have moved one step forward last week in so far as the difficulties. are better understood, and two inter- national bOdies are at work upon themi
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