VISCOUNT CECIL

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 3, Issue 643, 22 September 1933, Page 7

VISCOUNT CECIL

LEADING DIPLOMAT IN INTERN ATION AL AFFAIRS. BRED IN POLITICS. •One of Britain's leading figures in international affairs and a. founder of the Lsague of Nations, Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, who was prominent at the meeting of the British Commonwealth Relations Conference at Toronto last week, provided a sensation of the first magnitude in 1927 when hs resigned his post as head of the British delegation at Geneva as a protest against the manner in which thc disarmament campaign was being conducted. Lord Cecil at that time confessed that he was very disappointed at the gap between the professions and actions of the great Powers. Lord Cecil comes of a political lint, being the third soii of the Marquess of Salisbury, who was one of Queen Victoria's Prime Ministers. As a young. man Lord Cecil was prominent in the Oxford Union, and he gained political experience as one of his father's corps, of private secretaries. Eventually he decided to enter political life hy way of law, and he made such good progress in that profession that he "took silk" in 1899, having be.n called to the Bar twelve years previously. It was not until 1906 that he entered Parliament as Conservative member for East Marylehone, when he immediately became leadcr of the critics of Mr. Birrell's abortive Education Bill. He also dissociated himself from the tariff reform policy of his party, and was consequently out of Parliament for two years from 1910, when he was returned at a by-eleetion for Hitchin. He was a leading advooate of woman suffrage, and, though not approving militancy, was a strong eritic of forcible feeding. Hltimately, after women had been granted the suffrage, he had the satisfaction of initiating a resolution permitting them to sit( in the House of Commons. Viscount Cecil was in office throughout the Great War from the time that the Unionists associated J themselves with the Government in 1915 till the Armistice. His functions, first as Under-Secretary of Foreign Affairs, then as Minister of Blockade, and lastly as Assistant Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, were mainly concerned with the vital question of blockade, and it fell to him to announce in 1916 that the Allies had decided to abandon altogether the Declaration of London. When the General Election of 1918 came along. Viscount Cecil decided to resign on the grounds that he could not support the decision of the Coalition Ministry to tr eat Welsh Disestablishment as a fait accompli. In 1919 he went to Paris to assist in the formation of the League of Nations, of which from its inception he has heen ian enthusiastic advocate. Drifting away from the Coalition Ministry, he joined Mr. Baldwin's first Cabinet in 1923 as Lord Privy Seal, heing raised to a peerage in his own right the same year. His close association with' the League of Nations was recognised in 1924 when he received the first annual award of the Woodrow Wilson Peace Prize. In Mr. Baldwin's second Cabinet he was Chancellor of tjie Duchy of Lancaster, and on several occasions he ia.cted as deputy for the last Foreign Secretary (Sir Austen Chamberlain) at the League of Nations Assembly.