THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS: $300 for Junk

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White men have confidence that they can bluff a Chinaman. Perhaps that fact explains why Premier Count Stephen Bethlen of Hungary proceeded, last week, to bluff the League of Nations. He knew that the Acting President of the League Council is now, by alphabetical rotation, His Excellency Tcheng Loh, the Chinese Minister at Paris.

With this tall, gangling Celestial at the 'helm of the League, Count Bethlen dared, last week, to order destroyed the evidence in a case upon which the Council was expected to sit in judgment when it convenes in March. The case was that involving five carloads of machine gun parts, smuggled last December from Italy across Austria and into Hungary, where they arrived on New Year's Day. This smugglery (a flagrant violation of the Treaty of Trianon under which Hungary is disarmed) has caused Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia and Rumania, to demand a League investigation. Therefore, last week, Continental statesmen were electrified when it was announced, at Budapest, that the machine gun parts had been ordered broken up and would be sold as junk. Never did a suspected criminal more brazenly proceed to destroy "Exhibit A" before the very eyes of a judge not yet quite ready to hear his case.

Came the news from Budapest to Paris. Unhappy Acting League Council Chairman Tcheng Loh found himself a helpless victim of the alphabet. He was the wrong man in the wrong place. He speaks for a nation where wholesale smugglery of arms has produced incessant civil war. The very "Chinese Republic" from which he stands accredited at Paris has vanished in a welter of Chinese anarchy. Therefore his position in respect to a mere five carloads of smuggled machine gun parts was exquisitely awkward. No wonder then that Tcheng Loh betook his gangling, spidery self, last week, to the office of paunchy, sleepy-eyed French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, his friend and frequent counselor.

Together they drafted a telegram as timid as the position of Tcheng Loh is delicate. Transmitted through the League Secretariat, this message reached Prime Minister Count Bethlen of Hungary in the following form: ". . . The Council of the League, having before it a request from the Czechoslovak, Jugoslav and Rumanian Governments and having learned from the press that the Hungarian Government is going to sell the objects to which the request refers, thinks it would be prudent to delay this project, the matter involved coming before the Council in a few days."

Within a few hours came the curt, scornful reply of Premier Count Bethlen, a martinet, a virtual dictator: "The Hungarian Government tonight received with surprise your telegram. . . . The public auction sale [of the demolished parts] is scheduled for tomorrow. . . . It is impossible to postpone the auction. . . .

"I may remark that the regulations for investigation rights inherent in the League of Nations do not apply in the present case. However, the Hungarian Government as a courtesy to the Council's President, will ask the purchaser of the goods to leave them untouched where they now lie."