Armaments. It comprised some military men, but also a number of civilians--representatives of the workingclasses and of the manufacturers, experts and certain statesmen closely associated with disarmament propaganda and supposed to know all about the subject, such as Lord Robert (now Viscount) Cecil. The T.M.C. proved an unwieldy, expensive, ill-conceived organ, whose very mixed membership rendered it incapable of serious effort or clear thought. It held innumerable sittings, divided itself into sundry sub-committees and special committees, let off endless speeches replete with rhetoric and commonplaces, and issued reams of printed and roneo'ed matter. But the divergences between its military and civilian members, between some of the statesmen and those who professed to represent the working-classes and described themselves as 'nous, les militants ouvriers,' proved insurmountable. There were also serious differences of a national character, for although the members were supposed to be chosen not as national delegates, but as experts, often, alas, on the principle of lucus a non lucendo, many of them were semi-official spokesmen of their respective Governments. In other cases again they were apt to be disowned by their Governments, as occurred notably with regard to Lord Robert Cecil's proposal that, in order to make chemical warfare impossible, every State should undertake to publish all details concerning new discoveries in poison gas. National divergences were particularly conspicuous between the British and French delegates, the French being always obsessed by the fear of a German war of revanche, in which the former professed to disbelieve. Lord Robert Cecil's meritorious efforts to conciliate radically divergent views occasionally reminded readers of 'Pickwick' of the manner in which the editor of the 'Eatans will Gazette' composed his article on Chinese metaphysics.

The Second Assembly (1921) recommended the various Governments to limit their military budgets, and asked the T.M.C. to prepare a definite plan for the reduction of armaments. In its report to the Third Assembly (1922) the T.M.C. declared that, in order to make disarmament possible, some form of security against aggression was indispensable, and suggested a treaty of mutual assistance for that purpose. This statement undoubtedly did mark

an advance towards a somewhat more practical conception of the problem. The Third Assembly embodied the i proposal in its 14th Resolution, in which the following - principles were laid down:

1. No plan for the reduction of armaments can be successful unless it is general, i.e. unless adopted by all countries.

2. At the present time many Governments could not accept responsibility for such reduction without serious guarantees of security.

3. Such a guarantee might be secured by a defensive agreement open to all countries, who would thereby undertake to go at once to the assistance of any country which should be the victim of aggression, with the reservation that such obligation be limited, as a general principle, to countries situated in the same Continent or part of the world as the one attacked.

4. Consent to reduce armaments is the preliminary condition of the treaty.

The Council of the League was requested to ask the opinion of the various Governments on these proposals, and the T.M.C. was instructed to continue its work.

The reservation contained in paragraph 3 had been inserted to satisfy overseas countries, especially the British Dominions, thereby attenuating the significance of Article 10 of the Covenant, which had indeed been the chief obstacle to the entry of the United States into the League.

The T.M.C. during 1923 elaborated a scheme on the basis of Resolution 14. In the course of its work Lord Robert Cecil presented a plan for a general treaty of mutual guarantee among all States. Colonel Réquin, the French military expert, presented another whereby the various Powers were permitted to contract separate alliances providing for immediate mutual assistance in case of aggression. On the basis of these proposals the Third Commission of the Fourth Assembly presented a draft treaty of mutual guarantee, which the plenary Assembly decided, on Oct. 25, 1923, to communicate to the Governments for their opinion, without actually adopting it. This new scheme provided for a general treaty, to be supplemented in the case of certain States particularly exposed to aggression by special agreements; each State was to estimate the extent of the

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reduction of its own armaments made possible by these guarantees, and the Council, on that basis, would draw up a plan of the reductions to be effected, the various States undertaking to carry them out within the period fixed; thus the guarantee would come into force.

This draft treaty was an attempt to conciliate the general aspiration that some real reduction of armaments should be effected with the fears of France and of some other States lest their own even partial disarmament should offer possibilities of aggression. The inclusion of the clause sanctioning special agreements was introduced out of deference to the desires of the French delegates, who did not much believe in the efficacy of a general treaty of guarantee, and preferred to rely on the special military agreements with individual Powers which could be made to come into operation much more rapidly. But this clause alarmed some of the other delegates, who feared that it implied a return to the old system of alliances, and were convinced that France had insisted on it only in order to secure the League's blessing for the secret military conventions which she had notoriously concluded with sundry East European States, with the object of encircling Germany in a hostile ring and warding off any possibility of revanche, and perhaps also of keeping a menace against Italy up her sleeve. During the year 1924 twenty-seven Governments sent in their observations on the Draft Treaty, most of which were not very encouraging, and on July 5 the British Government, then under the leadership of Mr Ramsay MacDonald, definitely rejected it, thereby sealing its fate.

At the meeting of the Fifth Assembly, in September 1924, Mr MacDonald explained his reasons for rejecting the treaty, and raised the question of compulsory arbitration which he regarded as the only solution of the problem, adding that the admission of Germany to the League was closely bound up with disarmament. The French Premier, M. Herriot, defended the Draft Treaty; but declared his acceptance of the principle of compulsory arbitration. He stated that for France the three terms arbitration, security, and disarmament were inseparable. The British point of view was thus based on arbitration and the consequent reduction of land

armaments (naval armaments were to some extent ignored), whereas France demanded security in the shape of those military guarantees which the British delegation disliked.

On Sept. 7, however, a compromise was reached whereby the Assembly resolved that the Third Commission (disarmament) should examine the documents concerning security and the reduction of armaments, especially the remarks of the Governments on the Draft Treaty and the other schemes subsequently submitted to the Secretary-General of the League, that the First Commission (legal) should study the eventual amendments of the articles of the Covenant concerning the settlement of disputes and the possibility of defining the terms of paragraph 2 of Article 36 of the Statute of The Hague Court so as to facilitate the acceptance of this clause. The two commissions set to work, and, on Sept. 27, their joint report, a Protocol for the peaceful settlement of international disputes, and a resolution recommending the Governments to give careful consideration to the Protocol, were submitted to the Assembly and voted on Oct. 2, together with another resolution for the summoning of a new conference for the reduction of armaments.

The Protocol contained certain modifications of the Covenant and also some extensions of its principles. The great obstacle to a solution of the problem of replacing war by a judicial or arbitral decision lay in the fact that the sovereignty of the individual States had to be preserved. In the Covenant arbitration and judicial decisions were entrusted to organs whose authority was not superior to that of any single State; whereas the Protocol provided for the obligation of applying sanctions as a direct consequence of a decision of the Council of the League, eliminated the faculty of doing nothing, and set forth the obligation of each State, in order to resist acts of aggression, to collaborate loyally and effectively in the application of sanctions according to its geographical situation and the special conditions of its armaments. It further declared that there could not be a pact of disarmament unless it be accompanied by a pact of mutual assistance in case of aggression, and that aggression must be defined by a formula. The formula was as follows: a State which refuses to submit a dispute

in which it is concerned to arbitration, or, having so submitted it, refuses to abide by the award, is deemed to be the aggressor. Although the Protocol was voted by the Assembly and hailed as a heaven-sent decision calculated to put an end to all wars, the British Government (Mr Stanley Baldwin having succeeded Mr MacDonald) refused to ratify it, thereby condemning it, like the Draft Treaty, to oblivion, to the satisfaction of nearly all those who had devoted serious attention to the problem.

League activities for disarmament, however, did not by any means cease. The unwieldy T.M.C. was dissolved; but a new body, the Preparatory Committee, was set up to draft the programme for a new conference on disarmament to be held at a very early date, and both the United States and Russia were invited to send delegates to it. The United States accepted. The Committee appointed a military and an economic sub-committee (known as Sub-Committees A and B) to collect the necessary data for the plenary Committee as to the subjects to be dealt with by the future conference. The two sub-committees sat from May to November 1926, and presented their reports. These, when the plenary Committee met in March last, were taken as read, and the British delegate presented a draft convention for the programme of the conference. The French delegate thereupon presented another draft, and the two schemes were examined and discussed in thirtynine lengthy sittings. The divergences in the various points of view appeared very considerable, and the result was that a scheme of convention was drawn up in which a very small number of clauses were accepted unanimously, while many others were included as proposals of one or more delegations, with reservations or counterproposals on the part of others. This achievement was defined the first reading' of the convention; but the various delegations retained full liberty to go back on all their proposals, or on the consent they may have accorded to those of others, when the second reading takes place at the next session in November.

The outcome of these protracted debates was only to make the divergences between the various points of view clearer than ever, even in this purely theoretical