Passport Conference in Paris to which our representatives were invited, and Major Neville Lytton and Mr. Brian Lunn attended as representatives, The Conference agreed upon a number of important recommendations.
3. The Swiss Government, directly as the result of our agitation, were faced with vigorous criticism, and a six-hours debate in their own Parliament, They came in on the question of the Frs. 5 charge by the police for every town visited. This charge has been entirely done away with. During the winter months they have introduced a most excellent device of a paper written out by the consul which is handed in, at the frontier, saving a previous delay of about an hour.
4, The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg suddenly put a block across the traffic from Bale to Ostend, and levied a visa tax of Fr. 65. We immediately sent a letter to every member of the Belgian Parliament, and the tax was removed in a week.
5. The Belgians have introduced a transit visa of one gold frane, one of the recommendations of the Paris Conference of the League of Nations, and we hope rapidly to get this extended to other countries.
The work that remains to be done by the committee on this question is to bring pressure upon all the foreign governments, through our different representatives abroad, to see that the Paris recommendations are carried out, and to press for the abolition of all visas at the earliest possible moment.
The Paris recommendations are:
That a passport should last for two years.
That, the visa should last for the life of a passport.
That transit visas should be established at one gold franc.
That the maximum charge for a visa in any country should be 10 gold francs, and that the normal visa should be valid for any number of journeys for one year.
These would be material reforms, but the great thing is to press for the total abolition of visas, at any-rate between the allied and neutral countries.
The telegraph question is now to be taken up. This has so wrought itself into the business of eyeryday life that'any change in its cost more intimately affects the habits and convenience of the ordinary citizen than would the passage of an important Act ofod.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.