Evening Post. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1926. THE WORLD'S HOPES

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 58, 6 September 1926, Page 8

Evening Post. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1926. THE WORLD'S HOPES

Whether it is the Seventh or the Eighth Assembly of the League of Nations that meets at Geneva to-day is a matter of nomenclature on which wo do not know whether there has been any official ruling. The League was born on the 10th January, 1920, tho date on which the Peace Treaty signed at Versailles on the 28th of the previi ous June came into operation, and its First Assembly was held before the end of the year. At a time when the question whether the reservations by which the first tentative advances of the United States towards the World Court have been hedged are not nullifying in their effect is under discussion, it is interesting to recall the terms of, the summons to that historic meeting. Issued al--1 most exactly two years after the date of j the Versailles Treaty, it came not from I London or Paris or Geneva, but from Washington, and read as follows:— I At the request of the Council of the . League of Nations, that I summon a meeting of the Assembly of the League of Nations, I have the honour, in accordance with the provisions of Article V. of the Covenant of the League of Nations, to summon the Assembly of the League to convene in the City of Geneva, the Seat of the League, on November 13, 1920, at 11 o'clock. —WOODROW WILSON.

Seldom had tho irony of history been more fully illustrated by a formal document. Though the United States of America had dono far less for the winning of the War than any of the great European Powers, its name was apparently spelled with an "A" instead of a "U," or spelled in French, so that alphabetical priority should give it precedence over Britain and France in the list of signatories. But it cannot be denied that the selection of the President of the United Sates as the convener of the first meetings of both the Assembly1 and the Council of the League had a solid basis of morit, whether so designed or not, in President Wilson's great services in the shaping of the Covenant of the League and in the pertinacity with which he insisted upon its inclusion in the Peace Treaty. This personal ground of merit merely serves, however, to emphasise the irony of the position "in which Mr. Wilson was placed in regard to the Leaguo by the revolt of his countrymen. Nearly a year after his health had broken down in a great campaign for the ratification of the Treaty and the Covenant and the rejection of both was certain, Mr. Wilson was called upon to convene the First Assembly of the League from which his own country would be excluded. Referring to the ungracious pastor whose preaching is better than his practice, Fuller says:— And yet I deny not but dissolute men, like unskilful- horsemen' who open a gate on the wrong side, may by the virtue of their office open heaven for others, and shut • themselves out. With the highest character and the best intentions in the world, President Wilson's unskilful horsemanship had shut the door of the League- against his own country while opening it for every other. And though the personal and party animosities which had made the discussion of the question on its merits impossible have since been cooled by the lapse of six years, tho reservations by_ which America's approach even to the World Court is guarded are reservations of which Sir Francis Bell tells us that, if any member of the Council exercised such a I veto as that which she claims, "it I would wreck the Leaguo." . Since its first meeting on the date i mentioned the Assembly of the League has met regularly on the first Monday of every September, but none of those meetings has been comparable in importance to the one Special Assembly which \yas held in March. President Wilson sought to reconcile his advocacy of the League of Nations with the tractitional American objection to "entangling alliances" by the. contention that an organisation which was open to every nation and hostile to none was not "entangling" in the sense in which Washington used the word. It is for the Americans to settle that point as they think best, but from tho European standpoint it has been obvious from tho first that the Leaguo might degenerate into an entangling alliance of a very dangerous kind, and revive all the mischiefs of the Balance of Power which it was intended to abolish if any of the great nations of Europe remained permanently outside. As long as the hostility' of France kept Germany out of the League the reality i- of this danger was obvious even to the most superficial observer. Very wisely, therefore, the British Government insisted that the Anglo-French negotiations for a Security Pact with Germany must not be allowed to establish a rival jurisdiction to the League's, and that any arrangement arrived at must rcj cognise the authority; of the Leaguo

and be conditional on Germany's admission. It was on these lines that the Treaty of Mutual Guarantee was concluded at Locarno in October last. The ratification of the most promising attempt at peace-making since Versailles was properly- deemed worthy of the first Special Assembly in the his- ' tory of tho League, but after an orgy of sordid ■ intrigue, which was also without precedent in its history, tho world's hopes were wrecked by the vote of Brazil. The Seventh of the League's annual Assemblies, the Eighth of its Assemblies if the wretched fiasco in March be included in the reckoning, has now' the chance of retrieving that distressing and unpardonable blunder. The magnitude of the blunder was revealed in a startling fashion a few weeks later when Germany, having been rejected, or at any rate slighted, at Geneva, turned towards Moscow and concluded a treaty with Russia at which M. Tchitcherin had long been aiming. With this new evidence before it the Assembly which meets today has even less excuse than its predecessor for going wrong, and fortun- ! ately there is little chance of its doing , so. The sobering of previous hopes by an element of fear is really a distinct advantage. The events of the last six months, says the June "Round Table," the fiasco at Geneva, the Houghton report about Europe, the Russo-Ger-man treaty, have inflicted on public opinion an abrupt shock, a shock, which was in vivid contrast to the complacent idealism in which it had indulged for a few weeks after the publication of the Locarno treaties. This shock, as a matter of fact, is a good thing, for the realities of the world are very different from the luminous haee in which Locarno was consummated, and no solid structure can be built1 on anything but a clear recognition of what the facts are. It is certainly not in a "luminous haze" that the Assembly now meets, but all the fulminations of Spain have failed to create a storm-cloud.