At a time when many friends of the League of
Nations are inclined to be despondent, it is satisfactory to observe matters in which the League is functioning with greater success than ever. The Permanent Mandates Commission of the League which sat recently in Rome to inquire into the French mandate in Syria has sent its Report to the French Government with a request that the necessary action should be taken. As the Report is in several respects very unfavourable to the French, this is a remarkable fact. Such a thing is taken for granted now and causes little comment, but in order to see the significance of it we have only to imagine what would have been said before the War if an international Com- mission had looked into the affairs of a Great Power and proceeded to call it to order. The Commission makes every allowance for the peculiar difficulties in Syria—the mixture of races, the extraordinary variety of -religions and the absence of disinterested leadership. Still the fact remains that Syria is boiling over while Palestine and Iraq are quiet.
Previous page
