grapple with the whole question of freedom of inland communications and transit both for travelers and for goods, with difficulties at frontiers and difficulties with passports. To find solutions for these obstacles to a resumption of traffic in Europe this commission conducted the important conference at Barcelona last March.

5. The international credits commission has been formed to mediate between creditor and borrower nations. Its plan of action has already been proposed for the rescue of Austria from bankruptcy and it awaits the approval of that government.

6. The finance and economics commission is the chief agent through which the League of Nations is working for the economic reconstruction of the world. The credits commission is in effect an organ of this commission and especially of its finance section. The finance and economics commission is in a sense the successor of the supreme economic council, with which we were familiar in the war time. The finance section of this commission is the prime source of the above mentioned plan to establish a receivership for Austria.

7. The international health organization or health bureau has its origin in action by the Council in February, 1920, which led to the speedy provisional coördination of many agencies, like the national Red Cross Societies and the Office International d'Hygiene Publique at Paris, in order to fight under the name of the League against famine, typhus and other epidemic diseases in Central Europe. The effort caused the formation of the International Red Cross within the League. The health bureau went to work first for the succor of Poland. It has already held a series of health conferences. It was intended to be a permanent central office for existing international health organizations, to bring national health authorities into closer contact, to secure the coöperation of the international labor organization, to organize rapid interchange of information, and to ensure quick concerted action against epidemics.

But the Office International was created before the war by agreement among several nations, one of whom was the

United States. As the United States alone has withheld approval of this plan, the Office International has been obliged to withdraw from participation, the whole plan has been necessarily altered, and a temporary health organization has been substituted for the proposed permanent one. 8. The mandatory commission is formed to receive and consider the annual reports from the various mandatories, to see whether the terms of the mandates have been fairly observed, and to transmit its conclusions to the council. A majority of the members of this commission represent non-mandatory Powers. A Swedish member is a woman, Mme. Anna Bugge-Wicksell.

9. The opium and drug traffic commission has been appointed to find out how to regulate and control this traffic, now largely in the hands of British, American and Japanese dealers. The International Opium Conventions of 1910-1912 lost their status during the great war, and the evils resulting from the use of opium and other noxious drugs are now increasing in China and elsewhere. The secretariat is gathering information and the secretarygeneral has placed a Chinaman, educated in the United States, in charge of that work. An American woman, Mrs. Hamilton Wright, is one of the expert advisers of this commission.

10. The revision commission is created to consider all proposed amendments to the covenant which are to be acted upon at the next meeting of the assembly. The amendments that have been thus far suggested include:

a. The elimination of article X (Canada);

b. The admission of all sovereign states to the League that want to enter it (Argentina);

c. A great extension of the system of arbitration and conciliation under the League (Scandinavian nations);

d. The substitution of the following sentence for the present article XXI of the covenant: "The Monroe Doctrine is recognized as not incompatible with any dispositions of the present compact" (China); Czecho-Slovakia has another suggestion for a substitute for the same article.

e. Three amendments, proposed by Holland, relating to the system of electing councilors, to the rules of procedure, and to the method of sharing the expenses of the League. f. An amendment proposed by France, concerning

armaments.

11. The statistical commission, a central clearing house for the work of many statistical societies.

12. A commission on the deportation of women and children in Asia Minor, constituted by the council upon request of the assembly, is to collect all available information about Turkish and Kurdish deportations of women and children during the great war, and to place the results of its inquiry before the Assembly in September. The commission consists of two women and a man; the latter is Dr. Kennedy, nominated by the British high commissioner at Constantinople. One of the women members is Mme. Gaulis, named by the French government. The other is Miss Emma Darling Cushman, a native of Burlington, New York, nominated for this service by the presidents of Robert College and Constantinople College and the American Mission of Constantinople, all acting at the request of the British government.

Miss Cushman has been a resident of that country since 1900 has been in charge of various hospitals controlled by the A. B. C. F. M., and is now at the head of the Trachoma Hospital of the Near East Relief at Constantinople. In the same connection it should be noted that both the assembly and the council of the League have moved to set the League forces at work against the white slave traffic. The governments have been asked to revive the operation of the International Conventions of 1904 and 1910, against that traffic, and an international conference has already been called to meet at Geneva during the last week in June. So far the United States government has taken no heed of the invitations to send delegates to this conference.

The twelve commissions seem to me the principal outstanding nuclei of the administrative work of the League during the first sixteen months of its existence. The list by no means includes all of the commissions, bureaus and

conferences that are functioning in that work. Some of them deserve more than passing reference, especially:

1. The commission of jurists appointed to discuss and prepare the right system to be employed under article XVIII of the covenant for the registration and publication of all treaties;

2. The commission empowered to study and report upon the business organization and efficiency of both the secretariat and the Labor Office; and

3. The commissions of military and civilian control that have been endeavoring to keep peace between Poland and Lithuania in the Vilna territory.

Enough has been said here to prove the initial thesis of this article that the League of Nations is neither dead nor sleeping, that it has not been cast aside and cannot be without causing a new chaos in Europe, by disrupting the agreements on which the world now rests. Instead of diminishing its activities the League is increasing them. The second assembly of the League next September will find its work carefully prepared beforehand by experts and considered by the governments concerned. It ought to be the most efficient and the quickest moving world-congress that has ever met.

JAPAN AND AMERICA

By Kenneth Scott Latourette, Ph.D., Professor of History in Denison University

Our relations with Japan are occupying a large amount of space in the papers these days, and the burden of the news is not always nor even chiefly of peace and friendship. We are told by some publicists that war must follow and rather more widely than some of us would like to admit there seems to be an acceptance of that possibility. Such an attitude, one need scarcely say, helps to make armed conflict easy. If two nations come to think of war as possible it may be only a step toward thinking it inevitable, and when that stage is reached almost any incident may arouse the passions of the multitude to such a point that even the most pacifically minded statesmanship may find it impossible to avert hostilities. Such a conflict could be only a great misfortune to both combatants and it might well prove a disaster to either. It behooves all thoughtful Americans and Japanese, then, to examine again and again the factors in the situation and to strive for an honorable, just, and peaceful settlement of all difficulties. So grave is the problem, and of such wide spread concern, that no apology need be made for adding another article to the rapidly lengthening bibliography on Japanese-American relations.

At the outset it must frankly be recognized that under existing conditions misunderstanding and friction between the two peoples are inevitable and that so far as one can now see rival policies and ambitions are to intensify these as the years pass and for some time to come are probably, with increasing frequency, to bring about periods of stress. This does not mean that war must follow. It does mean that war would not remove the causes of misunderstanding but would act as a permanent settlement only if