THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS: Peace, Tennis, Golf
As the traveler from Italy bores upward into Switzerland through the great Mount Cenis tunnel, he comes upon a land where peace seems a foregone conclusion from the sheer stillness of its lakes and the immobile vastness of its mountains. There the Permanent Secretariat of the League of Nations is appropriately found in that most peaceful of Swiss cities, Geneva. Exotic female visitors by the dozen, score and million cry out, "How perfect!" and the slightly world-weary assistants of Sir Eric Drummond, Secretary General to the League since its inception respond, "How dull!"
Last week, however, the suave and efficient Sir Eric* received tidings which foreshadowed a modicum of English recreation amid the Swiss calm of Geneva. From Viscount Cecil of Chelwood came a crisp cheque for £1000, with the suggestion that £500 be allotted for tennis courts at the disposal of the League Secretariat, and that the rest be used to extend the Geneva Golf Club's course and to assist impecunious undersecretaries to join the club. Viscount Cecil added that the £1000 represented part of the $25,000 peace prize awarded to him by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation two years ago.
*He is the half-brother and heir presumptive of William Huntly Drummond, 15th Earl of Perth, eleventh Viscount Strathallan, hereditary Thane of Lennox. For all that, Sir Eric has been a secretary to somebody or something, and a good one, for over a quarter century. In 1900 he joined the British Foreign Office and served successively as Confidential Secretary to Sir Edward Grey, Herbert Asquith and Arthur Balfour. From 1912 to 1915 he was one of the Private Secretaries to Premier Asquith. From then on until 1919 he was Private Secretary to Foreign Secretary Balfour. Then President Wilson secured his appointment as Secretary General to the League of Nations, and he created and organized the entire Secretariat, which has not a little influence as the permanently functioning mechanism which must handle without friction the detail work of the League.
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