typhus in history has been raging for over two years. The Assembly heartily approved the work already accomplished under the auspices of the Council and, as showing the spirit animating its members, a large sum of money was contributed by the various governments to fight the scourge. Canada was the banner giver, making her donation equal to that of England and France, while China "came across" with $10,000 and even ex-enemy Bulgaria contributed her mite. What is more, President Hymans was empowered to nominate a committee of three delegates to act in coöperation with the Public International Hygiene Office, the Red Cross, and the League of Red Cross Societies in raising funds for fighting epidemics throughout Central Europe.

The Secretariat was requested to send a questionnaire to all governments asking what measures they have taken to combat the world wide evil of the traffic in women and children. The governments signatory to the congresses of 1904 and 1910 are to be immediately urged to put those beneficent conventions into operation. An international conference will be held prior to the next meeting of the Assembly to coördinate the replies to the questionnaire and to prepare a program for united action.

The Netherlands government, which was charged by the opium conferences at The Hague in 1912, 1913, and 1914 with taking the initiative in the international war on opium, has transferred her responsibility to the shoulders of the League. The Assembly therefore called upon the Secretariat to collect all available data on the production, distribution and consumption of opium and appointed a committee of three to sift the information and to report to the Council three months before the next meeting of the Assembly.

The Assembly adopted a budget of 21,000,000 gold francs. This included 7,000,000 gold francs for the Labor Office. Office. If America had been a member of the League our quota would have been about $220,000, which is about one-tenth of one per cent of what we spent on military preparation before the war, and about two-thousandths of one per cent of what we spent on armaments during a single year of the

war.

Finally, the Assembly refused to approve of Italy's proposal for an impartial international distribution of raw materials, it declined Senator La Fontaine's plea for the establishment of an international university at Brussels, and it was unwilling to record itself as favoring Esperanto as the international language.

No one, I think, can have read throughout, the debates that took place in the plenary sessions of the Assembly and in the sub-committees without being impressed with the very high order order of parliamentary discussion achieved, and with the evident desire of all the delegates to do the utmost possible to establish the League on a firm foundation, and to work out the confronting international problems in a spirit of helpfulness, unselfishness and fair play. There was no outpouring of partisan "bunk," no descending to personalities and misrepresentation that so often occur in even the best regulated and most otherwise exemplary of national deliberative bodies. Japan, for instance, refused to raise the issue of race equality and Bolivia decided not to press for settlement her long-standing dispute with Chile in order that no untoward event in the early stages of the League might precipitate differences and destroy harmony that was evidently being reached on other matters.

Comparing the first meeting of the

Assembly with the first meeting of the United States Congress which was scheduled to take place in the City of New York on March 4, 1789, one finds the odds in favor of the Assembly. At Geneva every delegate was in his seat when the Conference opened, while a dozen other nations seeking admission to the League had their representatives present. On the date set at New York, however, but five of the thirteen states appeared. Of the twenty-two Senators elected only nine answered the roll call and of the Representatives only thirteen out of the fifty-nine were present. It was not until April 5 that a quorum of both houses appeared, and thus inaugurated the first session of the first Congress of the United States. Rhode Island, moreover, did not join the "association" until a year and a half after it was a going concern, so I suppose there is still hope that the United States may in its own good time and in its own peculiar way join the League.

COUNCIL AND ASSEMBLY

Since the meeting of the Assembly, the Council has held two sessions carrying out the work for the most part entrusted to it by the Assembly. It has found time, however, to take note of two matters of special interest to the United States. It has made a polite answer to Secretary Hughes' note on Yap, notifying the United States that the League was not given the power to allocate mandates but only to lay down the rules by which mandates were to be administered. It has also taken note of the PanamaCosta-Rica boundary dispute by dispatching an identical telegram to Panama and Costa Rica reminding them of their obligations under the Paris covenant to preserve peace and asking for the facts. The United States has officially taken no notice of

this, and as my pro-league friend, Mr. Theodore Marburg, well points out, misses a fine opportunity to show our good-will to the League even though we are not a member of it. For as Mr. Marburg says: "We might well have telegraphed to the Council of the League, 'Our treaty guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Panama gives us a special interest in her dispute with Costa-Rica. But we realize that we can not lay down rules of action for other nations, and ourselves refuse to conform to them. We therefore associate ourselves with you in calling upon both countries to cease fighting.' Such action would have disclosed a friendly spirit such as the whole world would have appreciated. It would have helped, instead of slighting the League of forty-nine sister nations. And it would have disclaimed in the eyes of Latin-America intention to use high-handed methods in intervening in their affairs.

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And now the Brazilian Ambassador, the acting President of the Council of the League of Nations, has just summoned the members of the League to send delegates to the second session of the Assembly to be opened at Geneva on Monday, September 5. A most interesting and important program is announced. The provisional agenda includes twenty-five items, the principal ones dealing with armament reduction, communication and transit, the opium traffic, the traffic in women and children, the typhus campaign, international health, and international coördination of intellectual work. It is also proposed to select the judges for the international court if a majority of the nations have by that time ratified the court protocol.

AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE

This then is the League of Nations that the American people are told is a

failure! This is the Association that is already "scrapped!" This is the superstate that would violate our constitution and destroy our liberties!

In conclusion may I quote from a letter just received from a high official of the League of Nations which was written to me from Geneva on April 27.

The situation here is most serious. The continued attacks from home are having a disastrous effect not only upon this League of Nations but on the whole theory of international coöperation and conference. People who entered the League on the theory that it was to be a universal League and that America was willing to take her part-and by that I decidedly do not mean by military or financial contributions-feel absolutely nonplussed by the reports that come from home.

Of course, I have no need to tell you with what surprise they have read the statements that the League is a super-state and the executor of the Peace Treaty. To one who has been right in the midst of the thing, the impotence of the League, except in a moral way, makes any charge of its being a super-state utterly wrong, whereas as regards the Peace Treaties, it has religiously, and many people think wrongfully, kept itself as far aloof from them as possible except where it has been called in not so much to enforce conditions as to ameliorate them.

However, the disastrous thing at the present moment is that this continued distrust and attack from America is giving the enemies of the League on this side perfectly invaluable ammunition. They are making every use of it to destroy not so much the League itself as the spirit and purpose behind the League, in other words to get back to the old selfish nationalistic diplowhich bore such rich fruits in the years macy from 1914 to 1918. I honestly feel that if the situation continues much longer, if America fails to enunciate some real principles of coöperation to which she herself is willing to accede, we may come dangerously

close to the position of having destroyed the one really great ideal that was born in the

war..

It is a big responsibility that is placed upon America today. The world is looking to her for some really constructive suggestions and if she fails to produce them, I have every fear that we shall fall into an era of cynicism and selfishness. I am utterly convinced that there is not one man in a thousand in the United States today who realizes the repercussions of America's attitude both in crippling the friends of those policies which we ourselves have always cherished and in aiding the enemies who support that old order which we have always fought. However, despite all these always fought. discouragements, and despite the widening circle of enemies, the League is going ahead as courageouly as possible.

May I add that it is the duty of all true friends of the League to give Mr. Harding every opportunity to make good with his new association of nations. If it turns out that the Harding Association is substantially the Wilson League, only under another name, we can have no lasting quarrel with the President and the Republican dominant faction in the Senate, even though it is pretty picayune business, to say the least, for grown men to keep the world on the brink of revolution, famine and pestilence in order to save the faces of party politicians who can not otherwise get out of the holes they have dug for themselves.

If Mr. Harding, however, is unwilling or unable to give us an Association with teeth in it, the country must be organized to capture the Senate and the House for the existing League two years from now and the Presidency in 1925. Let our Republican leaders make no mistake. The League issue will not be settled until it is settled right.

staff of public welfare. Nothing like it has the world ever seen before.

Under the old Hague Conferences there was supposed to be a sort of Continuation Committee for the Hague Conferences, which consisted of the Council of Ambassadors at the Hague. They were absolutely without machinery which they could use for international purposes. Here in the Secretariat is the department of civil service for the world, which supplies the need which the ambassadors at the Hague never could meet.

THE INTERNATIONAL LABOR

ORGANIZATION

The second accomplishment of the League is the International Labor Organization. This started, as you know, in Washington. I would like to point out that the first Conference at Washington was the first world Congress since the war which voted to admit representatives of Germany, thereby indicating the sense of international unity which the delegates felt. The International Labor Organization is not under the Covenant. is under the Treaty, but it is a part of the League of Nations just as much as the Secretariat, the Council and Assembly are, and it has an organization similar to that of the other division of the League of Nations. Its principal work has consisted in first preparing and then proposing what might be called an international labor code.

It

The Labor Organization has held three conferences. The result has been the submission of such an international labor code to the Governments in the League, covering proposals for the regulation of labor-time in various kinds of occupations on both land and sea, and including also proposals concerning the protection of laborers who are engaged in dangerous occupations, and proposals for the protection of

women and children who are at work. The Labor Organization also produces voluminous and valuable publications, and it maintains contact with national bureaus representing it in all the capitols of the important nations in the League. They have one even at Washington, although we are not in the League, and the head of it is Mr. Ernest Greenwood.

THE COUNCIL AND ITS WORK The third achievement of the League of Nations is to be found in the work of the Council. While the Secretariat is the administrative staff, the Council is the executive committee. I might say it is a legislative executive committee of the world. It is always on the job through the Secretariat. In short summary, the Council has accomplished these things:

First, it has become the governing power for the Saar Valley, which it rules through its appointed Commission. The Saar Valley is a district inhabited by 650,000 people. The Council, representing the League of Nations, will be the governing power for the Saar Valley until 1935, when a plebiscite will be taken.

The Council is also the ultimate supervising and protecting power of the City of Danzig and its territory, in which 200,000 people live.

The Council is represented by the Chairman of the Greco-Bulgarian Inter-migration Commission, which is staving off possible wars in the Balkans, or has staved them off by directing the migration of the Nationals on either side of the GrecoBulgarian frontier, so that they may live each under their own flag.

The Council has also prevented at least two wars. One has already been referred to-between Sweden and Finland. The final decision of a Commission, giving the sovereignty of the Aaland Islands to Finland was outlined in the papers recently. It is not yet finally recorded but undoubtedly it will be accepted. At any rate, it is now practically impossible that there should be