added. The Director of the Political Section is a Frenchman, a former professor in London University and an eminent historian. A Swiss heads the Mandates Section, and an Englishwoman the Health and Social Section. A Frenchman, with an Englishman and an American as his associates, heads the Information Section. Each of these sections is in turn a cosmopolitan group. Over all is the SecretaryGeneral, an Englishman with a wide experience in diplomatic matters, with, as under secretaries, a Frenchman who represented France in the Allied Economic Council, an Italian who is the foremost international lawyer of Italy, and a Japanese of standing, who acts also as head of the International Bureau.1 No one, theoretically or actually, represents his own country, nor is anyone allowed to hold any political office in his own country so long as he is a member of the Secretariat. Yet it might be said that these men are human, they have strong national feeling, they have even represented their governments recently. This is true, and the international viewpoint of the Secretariat is not invariable. Nevertheless, it is the rule. Scarcely ever in my six months as a member did I find an inflexible nationalist. From time to time I made notes of my experiences. I find one which reads: Yesterday a talk with a Spaniard about printing documents which had been distributed to the Council, then a talk with a Greek from Smyrna regarding the GraecoBulgarian treaty, later a Drafting Committee where an Englishman, a Frenchman, a Serbian and a Dane, who both knew German as well, went over the French and 1 The staff of the Secretariat numbers 322 in all. This figure includes, besides the directors and members of sections, a large number of interpreters and translators, clerks and stenographers. It does not include the staff of the Labor Bureau which is also situated at Geneva. English translations of a German document for distribution to the Council. Greek, Serb, Dane, Briton, Spaniard, so they were, but I had forgotten it until I came to write it down. For in a few weeks they had become to me just so many interesting, working unselfconsciously together with a courteous, and friendly men and women, common purpose for a common cause. I learned too that the young intellectual from Asia Minor is thinking the same thoughts, is feeling the same enthusiasm for a new world order and the same hatred of the old, as the young intellectual from England or America. Why is it that these very human men and women, many of them citizens of countries with strong nationalist ambitions, are really thinking internationally? It is, I imagine, because the world is their employer, the welfare of the world their business; and so their professional loyalty is enlisted. There is also the fascination of the great adventure of trying to secure coöperation between nations. It is a most valuable achievement to have already created so devoted and singleminded a corps. These are the people who are busy, not only on the highly contentious matters which figure in the press as the only activities of the League, but busy also with a quiet background of daily work, weaving the warp and woof of the world's social structure. Being. the one permanent body of the League, their real power is great. To give you some idea of the varied nature of the work which goes through the hands of the Secretariat I will read a list of those documents which in one day were placed on my desk. Printed or multigraphed copies of all the important documents received or written by the Secretariat are circulated to all the members in order that they may be kept in touch with the activities of the League as a whole and with any mat ters affecting the subjects under their own special care. The list of one day's distribution is as follows: Two memoranda signed by the SecretaryGeneral on Freedom of Communication and Transit; a proposal from the Argentine Government regarding the establishment of an International Organization of Health and Demography; a memorandum on the constitution of the Permanent Mandates Commission; a telegram from the Chargé d'Affaires of Lithuania2; a letter from the Polish Government on the same subject; a letter from the Spanish Government placing two companies of infantry at the disposal of the League Military Commission for policing the territory in dispute between Poland and Lithuania; a telegram regarding the British contingent to the same area; several more documents from Poland and Lithuania on the same subject; a letter concerning the Provisional Economic and Financial Commission; a telegram from the National Congress of Brazil; observations by the Polish Government, signed by Paderewski, its representative at Paris, on the Constitution of the Free City of Danzig; a letter from the Cuban Government transmitting the names of the Cuban delegates to the Assembly; a report to the Council by the Advisory Commission for Military, Naval, and Air Questions, with a report by M. Bourgeois on the work of the Commission; a memorandum by the Secretary-General on the establishment of jurisdiction for the settling of disputes with regard to communications and transit provided in the Treaties of Peace; a statement from the Finnish Government regarding the Aalands Islands dispute; a telegram from the Landesthing of the Islands; a note by the Secretary-General concerning a protest from the German Government regarding Eupen and Malmedy; and several documents on the Armenian situation. Added to these was a synopsis of the daily correspondence received, comprising letters regarding Danzig, the Jews in Central Europe, minorities in Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, and Lithuania, and typhus in Poland. 2 Concerning the hostilities between Poland and Lithuania. This, of course, represents only a part of the work which had been brought to the League in the eight months after its inception. I might add that there were also distributed to us a copy of a daily review of articles on the League appearing in the English press, a similar weekly review of the press of France, the Scandinavian countries, the Americas, Italy and, in fact, the principal newspapers of the world, and a list of all magazine articles touching on the subjects under the care of the League. THE ASSEMBLY To anyone who was present in Geneva during November and December the organization of the Assembly will be the most dramatic and effective accomplishment of the League in its Assembly does not appear in the resolufirst year of life. The value of the tions adopted. Many of these were disappointing. Even the plan for a world court is open to criticisms. The most important achievement of the Assembly was that it met, and that from the first it showed itself to be not a mere collection of diplomatic representatives of different countries, jealous and uncompromising, but an entity. For the first time in history a large part of the civilized world met together under a written constitution, adopted rules of procedure, and voted to meet annually. You know that when representatives of different states assemble it is the custom to seat them according to the relation of the French forms of their countries' names in the alphabet. It was quite obvious at Geneva that it is going to be very good for the states of the world to be seated together annually according to this system, a system which, in the Assembly Hall at Geneva, brought the British Empire next to Brazil, France between China in front and Haiti behind, and Poland between Norway and Portugal. Even though the lion and the lamb do not begin with the same letter in French they there sat down together and set up friendly inter course. From the first the Assembly took on the aspect of a parliamentary body, with the usual broad divisions, the liberal, the conservative, and the larger indefinite middle group. Yet these groups, however keen their differences, showed themselves ready to arrive at a reasonable compromise in order to get the machine to running and to keep it so. To this spirit is due the fact that the Assembly was able to agree on its rules of procedure in the surprisingly short period of two sessions. The forces of reaction were strong, but they were forced into the open. The world, through the press gallery, could hear them. The forces of liberalism were strong also. From the first the issue was joined, the liberals, led by the Scandinavians and some of the British Dominions, fighting for publicity, and the conservatives striving to perpetuate the old methods of diplomacy. The successful struggle on the first day of the Assembly to get a secret ballot for the election of the presiding officer, the criticism of the Council for having been passive in the Russo-Polish war, the plea for the admission of the former enemy states, the gallant struggle to obtain from the Council information regarding the terms of the mandates,-these all gave proof of virility and promise of future vigilance. The little nations showed that they too had their statesmen. Men hitherto unheard of from Cuba, Chili, Haiti, made reputations which they will strive to maintain next September. The small powers are aware that the Assembly is both their hope and their opportunity. It gives them a field other than that of battle in which to register their worth. The delegates of the Great Powers soon showed that they too valued the Assembly and respected its opinion. After seeing the Assembly at work one need not have fear that the League will die if America abstains from entering. THE LEAGUE LIVES It is well to remember that a perfect political device does not spring full grown like Athena from the head of Zeus. It is a matter of development. The new machine provided in the covenant has been set in motion. We find that the cogs fit, the wheels revolve, the machine runs. The first stiffness is over. It is not a perfect machine, but it runs fairly smoothly. It is no more perfect than the first fire engine, which was run by hand. Even that primitive engine was useful for putting out fires. It was also the means to a better engine. There are three kinds of idealists in this country today. The first are those who wish America to turn her back on the world and to prosper in a splendid isolation. They are dreaming of yesterday-unless Yap has been a rude awakening. The second kind of idealists, in a divine discontent with compromise, refuse anything less than a nearly perfect League. I like to think that they represent tomorrow. Today it is equivalent to saying "If we can not have a perfect form of government we will have none." Between these two there is another kind of idealists. Aware that to gain international coöperation compromise is inevitable, they are willing to take up the tools at hand and to use all their power to fashion them into a more perfect instrument. President Motta of Switzerland, in opening the Assembly, said: "The League of Nations will live. Already it is impossible to think of the world without it. But it would be childish uals are impatient, because their spell of life is short, but collective bodies develop slowly because their life has no to expect miracles from it. Individ- limits." The First Year and a Half of the League of Nations THE By ARTHUR SWEETSER Member of the Information Section of the League of Nations HE question as to just what the League of Nations has accomplished in its first eighteen months goes straight to the root of international relationships. If, by and large, the results are good, it means that the nations have taken the first step, however halting, along a new line of progress; if not, they must retrace their way and seek a fundamentally different relationship. The question is infinitely difficult to answer. Exaggerated not less by its friends than by its enemies, its activities reported in a fragmentary and often contradictory way, the League has no common standard of measurement by which it may be judged. Yet such a standard must be found in order dispassionately to assess the degree of fulfilment of what is undoubtedly the greatest ideal born of the war. The League has not sprung into being complete nor yet by the scientific process of building one story upon another. Quite on the contrary it has come forth, so to speak, almost by spontaneous outgrowth within its various elements. Here necessity has led to one action, there to another, until a series of activities have sprung up over which only now is it becoming possible to spread a common roof. Undoubtedly the greatest fact of the League is that for the first time fortyeight nations are bound together in an organization, the cardinal obligation of which is that no nation shall go to war without having first had recourse to arbitration or conciliation. This single agreement fulfils hopes cherished for long years before the World War and may be claimed alone to justify the League. But by itself it is not enough. If peace may be preserved by a blanket agreement not to go to war without arbitration, it may more certainly, if with greater difficulty, be preserved by removing the causes of The preservation of peace, moreover, is not the only ideal on the road to human happiness; it is indeed but the first essential to those other conditions necessary to the full expression of civilization. war. Some kind of general, coöperative international machinery must therefore be created. fore be created. Whether or not the League has succeeded in doing that may be taken, then, as the measure of its success or failure. Against this very general, all-inclusive standard, all else is individual or incidental. It is not by the outcome of any specific plan or project that the League should be judged but rather on the broad question as to whether or not a scaffolding has been set up, however rough it may be, about which the nations may construct an edifice looking first to the preservation of peace and second to the betterment of world conditions by international coöperation. To answer that question it is necessary to go through the whole organization step by step, trying to evaluate not only what each part has already done and the means by which it has done it, but also to foresee what, under better world conditions, it may do. LEAGUE ORGANIZATIONS At the top of League organization are three general bodies, the Assembly, Council and Secretariat, which may be called upon to deal with any questions within the realm of international affairs. Of these the most important is the Assembly, an annual world meeting ground where each of the forty-eight states of the League is represented by three delegates. This body may become in a very real sense the register of world judgment. If by its composition it is too big, too clumsy, too occasional in meeting to go far into details, it is for these same reasons the ideal medium for focussing world public opinion on problems such as the Armenian massacres, the need of disarmament, or the desirability of a world court. The initial meeting, held in Geneva from November 15 to December 18, was the first gathering of the nations under a written constitution. Though drawn together from the far corners of the world, it settled down almost immediately into a smooth-running, parliamentary body with a clearly defined purpose and conscience. Impossible as it is to detail here all the work done in its thirty-one public sessions and fifty committee meetings, one fact we may stress; namely, that after it had had opportunity for three full weeks to demonstrate its usefulness, it decided, unanimously and almost spontaneously, that it should reconvene every year on the first Monday in September. Hence the old days when the Hague Conferences came together now and then on the mere whim of an individual have gone for good and the world now has an automatic meeting once a year. Next of the organizations created by the League is the Council, a small body consisting of representatives of the four principal powers and of four lesser powers, the latter elected at intervals by the Assembly, and consisting at the moment of Spain, Brazil, Belgium and China; in other words a body of five Europeans, two Asiatics and one South American. Whether or not one accepts the theory that in practical affairs the big powers must be assured a permanent seat in the Council, it is hardly possible to deny the need of a small executive body to make the current decisions and meet the special emergencies constantly arising. The Council, while frequently attacked, has done most valuable work. Indeed, it carried the League on during the nine months before the Assembly met; it laid out the general form of League organization; and, significantly enough, though there were strong currents of opposition to it in the Assembly, it was made the general executor of the Assembly's decisions. In its first year and a half the Council, through twelve sessions held in Paris, London, Rome, San Sebastian, Brussels, and Geneva, has developed into a business-like organization, meeting perhaps every two months, but capable of immediate convocation to provide that method of quick conference which Sir Edward Grey in vain endeavored to bring together in August of 1914. Alongside these two bodies has been set up the international Secretariat, one of the most unique organizations in the world. Here, nearly three hundred people from over a score of nations are working together not in any sense as national representatives, but, as nearly as this imperfect world allows, as impartial experts. Despite |