World peace and security, declared Dr. Wellington Koo in his speech, were being confronted by lawlessness and violence seldom witnessed in history. International law, instead of being a rule of conduct among governments, was being openly chal-longed or swept into the limbo of oblivion, and treaty obligations were being disregarded with impunity.
The League, Dr. Koo declared, had become a passive spectator, serving as a platform of empty platitude.
He urged the need of a radical change in the League's policy to rescue it from apparent paralysis and threatened disintegration. The League, he said, should boldly try to live up to its obligations to restrain aggression and maintain peace.
The Sino-Japanese undeclared war, the Chinese delegate said, had been raging for six months. Fifty nations had confirmed that Japanese aggression was solely responsible, and yet this aggression was being allowed to continue.
"For the moment we must realize that. in the present circumstances, the League is not in a position to achieve all that was hoped for. It was designed to hold all the nations 9f the world together in resistance to war and injustice. It was born of a universal desire to avoid a recurrence of the horrors through which the world had just passed. was an idea hailed by all nations as responding to an urgent and spontaneous impulse.
"Believing as we do that the impulse survives, we can hope that it will ultimately prevail and that differences will be narrowed fo those of method.
"For that reason it seems to His Majesty's Government essential in these difficult times, to retain what still exists. They consider that the League, despite its existing limitations, is the best instrument that has yet been devised for giving effect to the principles of international cooperation. and they are, therefore, determined to keep it in existence. to give it their full support, and to make use of its machinery and procedure to the fullest extent that circumstances permit.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.