THE LEAGUE: A Bit of Jugglery

To the rage of victorious Benito Mussolini, defeated Haile Selassie won at Geneva last week the right to retain his delegation’s seat in the Assembly of the League of Nations during its present session. British efforts to bar the Ethiopians, half heartedly seconded by the French, were called by veteran New York Herald Tribune Correspondent John Elliott “a bit of jugglery so contemptible that even a Tammany politician might have blushed to be connected with it.”

Divorce the Covenant? In a speech to the Assembly which many delegates called “amazing,” the repeated demands of Adolf Hitler that the Covenant of the League of Nations be “divorced” from the Treaty of Versailles of which it is an integral part were seconded by British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. He appeared to feel that only by rewriting the Treaty to suit Germany could that country be induced to rejoin the League. “Human life is not static,” argued Captain Eden, “but is rather a changing thing.” The Assembly last week did nothing about this Eden proposal.

Success with Spain. The same “Tammany” forces which failed to exclude Ethiopia last week had been simultaneously applying pressure to prevent the Madrid Cabinet from formally demanding that the League Assembly take action about the munitions now reaching Spain’s White Armies contrary to the declared embargo of the Great Powers (TIME, Sept. 7 et ante). Possibly because Madrid is now also beginning to get such munitions, Geneva success was achieved by those putting the pinch on Spanish Foreign Minister Julio Alvarez del Vayo. While he could not be persuaded to keep quiet, his empurpled and highflown Latin oration about Democracy being at the crossroads in Madrid was completely stultified by Orator Alvarez del Vayo himself when he announced that last week the Madrid Cabinet was not going to ask any action of the League Assembly. “The era of national wars is fast disappearing!” cried the Spaniard in his best passage. “Just as in the 16th Century in Europe men took sides and fought in the name of two religious ideals, Catholicism and Protestantism, so today, it would appear, men are divided by two political ideals, democracy and oppression. . . . The blood-stained soil of Spain is already, in fact, the battlefield of a world war!”