Welsh Journals

The League's Record. By A. O. Roberts, B.A., LL.B. A N Irish lady who had just spent an evening in the visitors' gallery of the Dail, com- plained afterwards to one of the deputies that she had "never been so bored in her life." The deputy answered "You have paid us the greatest compliment you could." Some- thing of the same kind seems to have happened at the last Assembly in Geneva; those who had gone there for spectacular effects, for scenes and demonstrations, saw instead a great organisation working with the precision and the matter-of- factness of an efficient machine. And indeed this aspect of the League cannot be too often emphasised; its purpose is not to thunder forth commandments from the eminence of some Alpine Sinai, not to direct armies and fleets and blockades, not to crush and cow a recalcitrant nation as an individual is summarily treated by the civil power of a State, but to urge the appeal of reason and good citizen- ship over the attraction of a profitable but anti-social intransigeance, to discover the rights and wrongs of a dispute, putting them in such clear light that the wrong cannot face the conscience of the world and still more, to bring about such an international order that conflicts of opinion cannot arise by removing at their source the causes of friction. The League is less an international sovereign power than a school of international co-operation; and there- fore the question of Mosul is still, very rightly, undecided* until the Permanent Court of Inter- national Justice shall make the competence of the Council so clear in this matter that its final decision shall have all the force of unimpeachable and unequivocal authority. It is therefore pro- posed in this article to give a brief glance over a few aspects of the vast and useful volume of good work accomplished by the League during the present year. The beginnning of the year saw the close of the labours of the two opium conferences sum- moned by the League in the previous winter. The first Conference, which was concerned with the gradual suppression of opium-eating in the Far East, resulted in the drawing up of an agreement acceded to by all the countries con- cerned with the exception of China, who with- drew from the Conference. The agreement in question was to the effect of reinforcing the measures already taken as a consequence of the 1912 Hague Convention. The signatories are prepared to take steps for the total suppression of this evil within a period of fifteen years; but this period will only begin to run when those countries now exporting opium make such export This article was written before the publication of the Court's award and the December meeting of the Council of the League. illegal. The second Conference, at the conclusion of thirty-eight plenary sessions and over a hundred sessions of various Commissions (America and China having in the meantime withdrawn) drew up a Convention creating a permanent committee for the purpose of control- ling international trade in opium and similar drugs. This Committee shall be furnished by the contracting parties with all details as regards the quantity of these drugs needed by them for their own consumption as well as statistics giving their annual production, manufacture, consump- tion, stocks, and import and export of narcotics. It was explained by M. Zahle, the President of the Conference, that the point of disagreement between the United States and the rest of the Conference was not one of principle, but had reference merely to the date of the period of fifteen years proposed for the gradual suppression of the opium evil. The United States were of opinion that this period should date from the signature of the Convention, whilst the other parties considered it should only run from a date when there should be little risk of the regulations being nullified by extensive smuggling-in other words only from a date when export of raw opium should cease from countries at present exporting it. Another task of conspicuous importance under- taken during the present year is that of the progressive codification of international law. A settled international society pre-supposes, in addition to a Court of Justice and its executive, a comprehensive and clear system or code of laws. If one of the major objects of the League is the establishment of the rule of law in inter- national affairs, international law must be at least as complete as the civil law of the most advanced political States. The comparative feebleness of international law, and the ease with which it has been ignored or defied with im- punity in times of war, can be accounted for less by the alleged non-existence of a public morality than by the fact that the violator could, often with success, cast doubts on the application or even the existence of the law in question. Those rules of international conduct which at present rest on the foundation merely of practice and custom and on the opinions of learned in international law, will it is hoped eventually be reduced to the form of a code; and divergent views (for example those of Great Britain and of continental Europe on the subject of maritime law) will have to be reconciled. If the Commit- tee of Experts convened by the League for this work can arrive at a Code of International Law that shall obtain the ratification of the various Powers, then the law of nations will for the first time have been placed on a scientific and serious footing and the third tgreat pillar of the new international order established. The Committee which met in April under the Presidency of M. Hammarskjold, set up sub-commissions to the