THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS: Iconoclasm

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At Geneva, was held the 33rd meeting of the Council of the League of Nations, possibly the most significant deliberation of that body in the six years of the League's history.

Protocol. The mightiest matter which was discussed was the Protocol* to the Covenant of the League. There were three principal speakers:

Chamberlain. Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain, sprucely attired, monocle firmly fixed in his right eye, rose to read a document wherein was written the voice of Great Britain and the British Dominions beyond the seas (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Union of South Africa). The voice passed sentence of death on the Protocol for the following reasons :

1) Because it was likely to interfere with the inter se relations between the various component nations of the British Commonwealth.

2) Because, without U. S. cooperation, the Protocol was seriously crippled. (What Mr. Chamberlain doubtless meant was that— although a definite entente between the U. S. and Britain cannot be proved to exist— no Government in Britain or in the British Dominions would today care to align itself against the U. S. The same might be said in a converse case, for it remains a fact that the foreign policies of the two countries, discounting inevitable differences of opinion, are to a large extent identical. Concrete expression of this premise is difficult, but it is notable that at no point is there a conflict of interest; rather the reverse, for there has been a marked inclination to compose any differences which have arisen in the near past.

3) Because economic sanctions against an aggressor nation would be useless while so many nations, U. S., Germany, Russia, Turkey, etc.) were nonLeague members, for the reason that the effect would be to divert the trade of an outlawed aggressor from the signatory to the non-signatory states of the Protocol.

4) Because the use of force against an aggressor in cases where economic sanctions had failed is strangely out of place in the Protocol, which was designed primarily to promote peace. Mr. Chamberlain said that war was in the pathology of international life; and, just as it was a bad thing for men to think too much about the possibility of disease, so it was wrong for the Protocol to stress war.

Briand. After hearing Mr. Chamberlain's speech, the Council adjourned for luncheon; and M. Briand had three hours in which to prepare his reply and to obtain a confirmatory statement from his Government in Paris. When the Council reassembled, it was obvious that the impression made by Mr. Chamberlain's well-reasoned reading of his Government's document was gloomy; as M. Briand subsequently put it: "I had the impression of being in blackness, in a tunnel where there was no light." Rising, however, in a later session, M. Priand, seven times Premier of France, vigorously assailed the British Government's contentions. He started:

''The document read to us is marked by a high serenity and gentle philosophy which I hesitate to affront. I have tasted this philosophy and appreciated its nobility and I wonder if my philosophy is fit to face it."