udgeted for a smaller service, only
one--Yugo-Slavia--has managed to balance her budget, and the others have
large deficits which are many times covered by their expenditure on
arms. And this is going on at a time when all these eight nations are
taxed almost up to their limit, when the whole of their industries are
suffering in consequence, and when the danger of bankruptcy, which
horrified the financiers in 1920, is even more imminent.

That being the case, what has been done in the last few years to remedy
this matter, and why is more not being done? As you all know, this
question is in the forefront of the programme of the League of Nations.
And the League began to deal with it at once. Lord Robert Cecil will
agree with me that the framers of the Covenant, of which he is one of
the chief, could not foresee everything, and they did not foresee at the
time the Covenant was framed, that machinery would be required to deal
with this extraordinarily complex question of armaments. They created an
organisation then called a Permanent Military Command, still in
existence, to advise the Council of the League on all military matters.
But when these gentlemen got to work upon such questions as reduction of
armaments, they at once found themselves dealing with matters entirely
beyond their competence, because into this problem enter problems of
high politics and finance, and a thousand other questions of which
soldiers, sailors, and airmen know nothing whatever.

THE LEAGUE'S COMMISSION

The first step was to remedy an oversight in the machinery, and that was
done at the first meeting of the Assembly. The first meeting of the
Assembly created a temporary mixed commission on armaments, which was
composed of persons of recognised competence in political, social, and
economic matters. It consisted of six members of the old Permanent
Commission, and in addition a number of statesmen, employers, and
representatives of labour. This body started to tackle this grave
question. Before it began the first Assembly of the League had suggested
one line of approach--that there should be an agreement to limit
expenditure; that an attempt should be made to limit armaments by
limiting budgets; and nations were asked to agree that they would not
exceed in the two years following the acceptance of the resolution the
budgeted expenditure on armaments of the current year.

That proposal did not meet with great success. It was turned down by
s