FINAL MEETING ENDS

Greymouth Evening Star, 20 April 1946, Page 5

FINAL MEETING ENDS

LEAGUE OF NATIONS NOW DISSOLVED “OUR WORK HAS JUST BEGUN” GENEVA, April 18. The President of the League of Nations Assembly (Dr. Carl Hambro, Norway) to-night rapped the table with his gavel and said: “I declare this meeting of the twenty-first and last Assembly of the League of Nations closed.”

The delegates of 34 States filed out rapidly from the great hall to catch then’ night trains home, leaving empty buildings, where a skeleton staff of the League Secretariat will work to complete the handing over of activities to the United Nations. Dr. Hambro, in his final speech, recalled the League’s great figures. He expressed the hope that the Palace of Nations would not cease to be a centre of international activity. “It is the moment of parting, but it is not a day of sorrow,” he said. “We part as we met—delegates of our Governments and servants of a great idea—but as we break up we knofa that the League’s soul goes marching on.” „■ After a resolution winding up the League had been passed unanimously, Mr. P. Noel-Baker (Britain) declared that he was speaking then to show that the British Government had supported the League to the very end and indeed beyond it. “The British Government paid its full contributions to the League throughout the years,” he said. “We know that secret diplomacy does not bring understanding, which comes from discussion in the open. We know that the World War began-in Manchuria 15 years ago, and that we could easily have stopped Mussolini if wc had taken the sanctions which were obviously required—if we had closed the Suez Canal to the aggressor and stopped his oil. “Our work is not ended. It has only just begun. We start again as from this evening, and this time not only peoples, but governments, understand the' problems.” Member States of the League of Nations, during the life of the League, paid contributions totalling £33,000,000, of which £3,000,000 was transferred to tangible assets which will shortly be handed over to the United Nations, says the final report of the League’s Finance Committee. It adds that valuable gifts of various kinds presented to the League will also be handed over, in the hope that in accordance with the wishes of the donors they will, remain in the building to which they were presented. Mr. Noel-Baker pledged British support for the International Institution of Intellectual Co-operation at a meeting at which the continuance of the institution was considered.