1930 - Annual Convention Report

              56 A L B E R T A W O M E N ' S I N S T I T U T ES
REPORT OF STANDING COMMITTEE ON L E A G U E OF NATIONS
Mrs. J. N. Beaubier, Champion, Convener.
The Committee on the League of Nations is the youngest child in the
family of Alberta Women's Institutes. While this organization has always
been interested in, and sympathetic to the League and for all it stands, not
until last year did the Council consider it advisable to name a convener for
this particular division. Consequently this brief talk can hardly be termed
a report, as the committee is not as yet in full working order. However, if
by this effort greater interest is created in the movement for world peace,
its purpose will have ' been served.
No doubt the majority of us are more or less familiar with the foundation
of the League of Nations and the degree of success or failure with which it
has met. Nevertheless I shall ask your indulgence while we briefly review
the organization, development and so termed failures of this great world
parliament.
No one would attempt to say through what man, or race of men, nor on
what occasion the idea of universal peace first found expression; nor with
these speculations need we concern ourselves at the present. We are told
that virtually all nations played greater or smaller parts in the growth of the
idea that found the first definite expression in the International Peace Con­ference
which convened at the suggestion of Tsar Nicholas II, of Russia, in
May 1899. This conference sat for three months, and in its final act estab­lished
the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which was ultimately housed in
The Hague Temple of Peace, erected in 1903 under a gift from Andrew
Carnegie.
The Hague Court had rendered nine decisions of international importance
before the W o r l d War. Then came the cataclysm that swept it, and so much
else, away, though it was to have a resurrection under other auspices and
with more hopeful prospects. .
At the close of the war came the long- drawn negotiations at Versailles
from which eventually developed the new gospel of international relations in
a firm and practical bond of co- operation and good- will and open to the
nations of the world.
In 1918 General Jan Christian Smuts, South African soldier, statesman
and scholar, submitted a memorandum to the Peace Conference, entitled " The
League of Nations; A Practical Suggestion." This was published in the news­papers
all over the world and met with general favor. Woodrow Wilson,
then President of the United States, who had proposed such a league, David
L l o y d George and other world leaders of that period, nodded approval, and
the memorandum, in substance, became the Covenant ( or constitution) of the
League of Nations. This gave the world what it. never had ' before, an inter­national
organization, designed to be permanent, and capable of growth; an
association of countries pledged by treaty to work together " to promote inter­national
co- operation and security."
W r i t t e n indelibly on the hearts and souls of a devastated and war sick
world is the date— January 10th, 1920— when representatives of fourteen na­tions
set their hand and seat to that covenant; mere representatives of the
recent war allies with not a single F o r e i g n Affairs Minister nor a Premier
among them. A very humble and rather discouraging beginning we must
admit, yet— a beginning— from which has grown, in ten of the most eventful
years in history, the greatest force towards international justice and co­operation
the world has ever known.