Mar, 17.
Ir is not unlikely that a good many readers are very much at sea'as to what precisely is the nature of the Geneva Protocol to which Mr. Austen Chamberlain has refused Britain's signature.
Discussions on the subject have continued: over several months; always difficult to follow and to carry in mind from day to day owing to the necessity of condensing for telegraphic -capacity a very intricate subject, they are interrupted and submerged by something momentarily more important, like the British ¢lections; and in the end we find we have' arrived at a crisis of worldwide importance without knowing. quite. what it is about or how we have got there. Som outstanding facts and broad on lines may therefore be welcome.
The idea of the Geneva Protocol may be attributed to two principal motives: the desire of France to get some equate international guarantee against Germany, coupled with the feel-, ing of other nations that if such guarantee could be de ised, might induce France evacuate the Ruhr and thus relieve a tension which all found intolerable: and secondly, a desire: to strengthen the authority of the League and enable it to force arbitration on disputing: nations. the ple of the' quarrel between Italy and Greece: over the Albanian murders, the first occasion when the League's} usefulness had really been tested, having conspicuously proved its invfficacy to control an angry nation. The evolution scheme of mutual assistance, arbitration and disarmament, pushed by the zealous hands of. Dr. Benes, of Czecho-Slovakia, proceeded through the summer' months and at the beginning of September Mr. Ramsay Mac-Donald went over to Geneva to Pronounce judgment. His criticism was destructive. He pointed out that the terms on which arbitration was to be applied needed much clarifying: he, thought that international disarmament ought to come first as an earnest of the nations' real desire to settle their disputes amicably, without which evidence of a change of heart other' resolutions would be a vain expenditure of air; and he made it quite plain that he was not going' to sign blank cheques which his countrymen might decline to honour. A pretty little scheme, closed on his own; just as the! from the Continental point of radical insists on freedom of view, had been elaborated, that! speech on religion, about which! the British Navy should be more he generally knows nothing, or less made over to the Lo: and objects to freedom of ex-cost of about £5,000,000, Pression on economics, because; annually to the British taxpayer, he fears what. he calls obscurant-!to do the world's policing. Thi: ism. Each in his own field also most unfeelingly seems to develop not only by Mr. Arthur Hender-non-understandable gon of the) son But undeterred by these specialist, but he gains a cock-rebuffs, the League sub-committee sureness" from the curious ex-persisted in its work pression, perhaps, on the faces September 22 produced the final of listeners when he is talking|draft of the Arbitration and about something which it disarmament Protocol. Essential taken him twenty years to-learn points of this scheme were that and nobody else seems to under-|no nation should ever make stand or care about. Listen to|except in resisting aggression or the engineer dilating on electrons with the consent of the League or the mathematician going t0 in combining against an aggress-x's and y's or the musical critic worrying about dissolving ninths. How limited really is their knowledge, for what they know are the petty technicalities of their trade, much as a shoemaker makes a heel. The old philosopher with less knowledge had this advantage, that he thought more, he worried out. the great truths be-or, the latter being defined as one who refused to accept the League's call to it to submit to arbitration. Nations were to pledge themselves not to resort to war and to abstain from action likely to cause war. Every nation was also to make a statement to the League of the approximate amount of land, sea and air forces it might contribute to the common cause in imposing "sanctions," otherwise making' war -on a delinquent who disobeyed the League. These sanctions are really the essential part of the undertaking and the clauses relating to them are as follows:-—
Article "11 states:—Those obligations shall be interpreted as obliging. each of the signatory States to cooperate loyally and effectively in support of the Covenant of the League of Nations and in resistance to any act of aggression in the degree which its geographical posi tion and its particular situation as regards armaments allow, In accordance with paragraph 3 of Article 16 of the Covenant, the signatory States give a joint' and several undertaking to come to the sistance of the State attacked oF threatened, and to give each other mutual support by means of faeilities and reciprocal exchanges as regards the provision of raw materials and supplies of every kind, opening of credits, transport and transit, and for this purpose to take all measures in their power to preserve safety of communication by land and by sea of the iched or threatened State.
Turkey shows to-day in refusing to admit that the expulsion of the Greek Patriarch is anybody's affair but her own.,. And the sentiment of every free nation instinctively applauds. For in the long run it is the people who control foreign policy, not their Government, and where national honour and national existence are at stake and the public begin to get excited, arbitration clauses go whistling down the wind.
To the British peoples the Protocol was obnoxious, because it contained so many suspicion that an attempt was being made to entrap them, as the widest-flung empire and still the greatest sea' Power, into doing the rough work at the bidding of a committee of foreigners not by any means necessarily friendly to themselves. And the average Briton is growing more than a little tired of taking his cue from abroad, which appears to have been the gui war, without the faintest evidence that he can detect of Article 13, paragraph 2, states:
Furthermore ax soon as the Council hax called upon accordance with any'
which they may pre-ave concluded, bring to the talk of a proposal from for a further dij ment conference: we do not think it will be well received in England, For the only praetienl effect of the Washington Conference was to persuade Great Britain to cut down to the level of other nations' navies the sew When one studies these paragraphs carefully one can hardly wonder at Mr. Austen Chamber-ain's criticism that the business of the League appeared to be the organization of war on a large scale. He also repeated Mr. Ramsay MacDonald's eritiefsm in a different form, when he asked why it should be expected that ons having agreed to arbitration should at once submit to disarmament. If the one scheme failed, why not the other? Tt was the old difficulty of obtaining some real evidence of an international and national change power which is as vital to her existence as land power is to that, say, of France, There is a widespread feeling throughout all the British Empire that it is time it began to assert its own wishes and interests and to shape its own course without perpetual question of Who will be offended by this, and What will so and so sy? "History affords proof enough that such independence of action will never be used for Purposes of aggression. The last thing the British peoples desire is to fight, But neither do they relish having their policy dictated to them by other of heart.
Now it is fairly obvious that, if the League of Nations is to be
pious aspirations, it must be han a vehicle of
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.