THE LEAGUE: Court & Council

To Secretary General Joseph Avenol of the League of Nations onetime U. S. Secretary of State Henry Lewis Stimson cabled last week from his Manhattan law office: WHILE DEEPLY APPRECIATING THE HONOR CONFERRED BY THE NATIONAL GROUPS WHICH HAVE SUGGESTED MY CANDIDACY FOR THE WORLD COURT, I REGRET TO SAY THAT IT IS QUITE IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO ACCEPT THIS NOMINATION. With Statesman Stimson thus eliminating himself, the way was open for the League Assembly to elect a jurist against whom it could not well be argued that he was “political” and narrowly represented his country’s interests on the World Court bench. Last week purist Geneva internationalists and League Secretariat members were immensely pleased when a Man from Missouri, Dr. Manley Ottmer Hudson, 50, a graduate of William Jewell College at Liberty, Mo. and of Harvard Law School, was elected to succeed as a Judge of the World Court onetime U. S. Secretary of State Frank Billings (“Nervous Nelly”) Kellogg who resigned before his six-year term was up.

Round-faced, invincibly small-town Dr.

Hudson is today Harvard’s Bemis Professor of International Law. Colonel House put him on the preliminary commission for the Paris Peace Conference. Sailing with President Wilson, Manley Hudson participated at the accouchements of both the League of Nations and World Court, and ever since has been up and about all kinds of peace endeavors at Geneva and The Hague. Until last week Dr. Hudson had been regarded as more likely to continue to write books with the greatest authority on the World Court than to sit on it as a Justice. His election, hailed as democratic, also marked an ebb in the Court’s prestige to a level at which bigwig statesmen are not so anxious to sit in judgment at The Hague as they once were.

Quietly elected to the Court also last week was its onetime Clerk, Swedish Academician Knut Hjalmar Leonard Hammarskjold. Elected with eclat was the distinguished Chinese Supreme Court jurist Dr.

Cheng Tien-hsi, the eclat being due to the fact that he assembled and supervised in London the Chinese Art Exhibition which recently had all Europe agog (TIME, Dec. 9).

China into Council— Ever since the permanent seat on the League Council created for Japan was vacated when that country withdrew from the League (TIME, March 6, 1933), China has been loudly expostulating that no Asiatic country had a place on the Council and that, at the least, China ought to be given one of the rotative, nonpermanent seats which are good for three years. Last week the Assembly elected Latvia and China each to a nonpermanent seat on the Council.

This was no mean triumph for the years of patient diplomacy practiced by China’s greatest diplomat, Dr. V. K. Wellington Koo. Since Japan and China are again at dangerous loggerheads, the winning of a Council seat at Geneva now gives China a front-row vantage post from which to shriek to the World for help should Japan again strike.

A Palestine for Poland— Poland sought at Geneva last week, some place to which to deport Polish Jews. In a speech which stopped just short of asking the League to give Poland additional territory with a status like that of mandated Palestine.

Polish Delegate Lytus Komarnicki cried: “Over-population makes it extremely difficult for the Jewish surplus population of Poland to fit themselves into the country’s national life.” While many a Polish Jew is going to Palestine, Delegate Komarnicki added significantly “Palestine alone cannot suffice as a place for settlement by the Jews who represent about 10% of the 33,000,000 inhabitants of Poland. My Government will present detailed proposals later!”

Taking a crack at Britain’s administration of Palestine which is now virtually in a state of Arab insurrection, President Christian Lange of the League Council’s Mandates Committee declared: “We are astonished that the mandatory power has been unable to halt this violence.”