Wake

Two Irishmen were in charge, and between them and the other delegates they made it a real wake. Among the 35 nations whose 300-odd representatives gathered last week in the huge, empty Palace at Geneva to bury the League of Nations, there were sentimental oldtimers keening over the past.

There were harsh words and bruised feelings quickly soothed, like Argentina's when she walked out, miffed at having missed a vice presidency. There was the poor, estranged relative waiting in the vestibule--Austria, whose bid to come in was turned down "with a note of sympathy." There was an inevitable sponger, Russia, who couldn't come herself but sent word by two neighbors, Czechoslovakia and Poland, that she could use a share of the League's leftover funds. There were bustling busybodies, unable to get their minds off last-minute arrangements, like China with her demand that League mandates be opened to U.N. inspection.

Above all, there were the endless words of praise for the departed, well larded with excuses for his weakness. "It was not so much that the principles of the League were rejected," mourned its ancient champion, 81-year-old Viscount Cecil, "[as that] the governments seemed to think all they needed to do was to give . . . tepid approval."

Born 26 years ago to an age of easy idealism and easier cynicism, the League had always been a dreamy, unhealthy child. One of its parents had repudiated it even before birth. The other nations had little more time or use for it, as it shifted about Geneva's hired halls. When at last in 1936 it moved into its own $10-million Geneva home, Hitler was also moving--into the Rhineland.

In the years before, Mussolini had marched on Corfu. The three-year-old League had been too timid to rebuke him, so France and Britain had elbowed it aside to push the aggressor out themselves. Paraguay and Bolivia had fought a three-year war over South America's Chaco without interference. And Japan had marched calmly into Manchuria and out of Geneva. "The League," said Delegate Matsuoka then, "has done an awful thing. ... It has attempted to elevate itself to a superstate. Is the world at this stage really prepared to accept it?"

Far from preventing aggression, the League had been unable as early as 1923 even to define it. Against Italy its only weapon, economic sanctions, had proved impotent in 1935. And in 1938, a comical figure instinct with tragedy, Haile Selassie, the Conquering Lion of Judah, stood before the Council at Geneva and heard his country voted a fair Italian conquest. From then on, death for the League was only a matter of creeping paralysis.

Last week Acting Secretary-General Sean Lester and his aid, Martin Hill from County Cork and the League outpost at Princeton, N.J., were ready to declare the lifeless League officially dead. To its heir, U.N., go all the League's dreams, its Geneva buildings, its near-million-dollar library and $162.28 worth of equipment for making tea.

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