BY DEGREES

Lost in the column-filling activities of the three Ruths, the achievement of the Eighth Assembly of the League of Nations have been brought to notice by the address of Manley O. Hudson, Bemis Professor of International Law, before the Massachusetts branch of the League of Nations Non-Partisan Associations Except for the doubtful precedent of The Hague, which proved to be not even an annoyance to the activities of Mars, the League has been forced to learn solely through its own mistakes. The Russo-Polish War, the Upper Silesla affair, the massacre at Smyrna the occupation of Corfu the Geneva protocol the Greco-Bulgarian frontier altercation, and the squabble during last year between Brazil and Spain have been the annual causes of "I told you sols" from the irreconcilables of post-bellum days: largely because the meetings of the League to consider problems have been too tardy.

The 1927 assembly has taken steps to insure immediate convocation through special telephone, telegraph and airplane arrangements. This would seem the most ordinary of precautions, but its unlovely materialism had previously been absent in the rosy abstractions of diplomatic oratory. It seems as though the action of the League is nearly always tardy or indecisive when it depends upon the fourteen chair-holding and voting nations. For example, the Americans who feared the six-to-one British voting ratio will not be mollified to learn that this year Canada has been elected to a voting place. The assurance by the Imperial Government that the colonies are autonomous communities within the British Empire will be queried in several more states in the Union than Illinois.

Below the bubbles of diplomatic froth is going forward a work that represents real progress in international co-operation. The Conventions on the Traffic in Opium, on the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children, on the International Regime of Railways, and on the Supervision of the International Trade in Arms have been signed or ratified by a majority of the countries of the world. It is safe to say that all the heralded accomplishment of the Hague Conference did not compare with the sum of these benefits.

If the work of the League be regarded as it was by Woodrow Wilson in the light of a panacea for all international ills, there is little comfort in the record of the past eight years. Overlook the work of the Conventions as the people do, and the one achievement of the League of Nations is that it meets.