The British Delegation will have gone back to England and as there
was some friction between our delegation and theirs, I think it is
probably wise for me to give you my version confidentially.

A cable to you from Evatt [1] came through the office the other
day and it seems to me to put the matter very clumsily. As a
matter of fact I consider that Evatt performed a great
intellectual tour de force at San Francisco. These tours de force
are not always successful and they bring a good deal of publicity,
which is not always beneficial, but on the whole I thoroughly
supported Evatt's position. As you will realise, the conference
was exceedingly strenuous; it was so strenuous that I cracked up
and had to go into hospital for a week. This was due very largely
to the way in which Evatt worked. There was no organisation,
although I did my best to bring it about. Everything was done by
Evatt, or under his instructions, by the team which he had brought
with him and the work consisted partly of preparing speeches to be
made by Evatt, or drafting amendments to be moved by him, partly
of very close negotiations with various other delegations. The
latter took up most of Evatt's time during the day and the result
was that most of the other work had to be done between 10 p.m. at
night and 2 in the morning, and the poor typists had, very often,
to work from that hour onwards. Work of this kind was quite
impossible for me and one had a feeling of frustration. The work
could have been organised so as not to put an undue strain on
anybody. I tried to bring this about but was unsuccessful.

In addition, the conditions of working in the Conference were bad;

a committee room about 60 x 25, without ventilation, would contain
over 100 people. Speeches had to be translated from English into
French and vice versa, and speeches in Russian, Spanish or
Chinese, had to be translated both into French and into English.

There was no agreement as to methods of procedure to start with
and 80 percent of the first fortnight was wasted in discussing
methods of procedure. You can realise the exasperation of work of
such kind. In the circumstances, I do not think that anyone can be
blamed for occasionally losing his temper, or any friction which
occurred. As you know, Evatt is not very tactful and, in addition,
his manners are none of the best, in fact he can be exceedingly
rude and he did not restrain himself.

I know all Evatt's weaknesses and have no admiration for the way
in which he works but I have to confess that I believe that he
played a very constructive part at the conference and that he
pointed out the weak points of the main scheme, conducted a very
fine campaign against them and that on the question of the
Economic & Social Council and the Trusteeship clause, he was very
largely responsible for the draft which appeared. Here is where
the main conflict took place with the British Delegation. An
episode occurred, which he has tried to explain in his cable to
you.

After the draft was complete, Lord Halifax issued a statement in
which he said that the British had ideas on trusteeship for
dependent peoples and out of these the chapter on trusteeship had
developed. I enclose a copy of the statement. [2] It is hard to
accuse Halifax of being disingenuous, but this is certainly not a
fair statement. I believe that you are not very favourable to the
Mandate System. I am a strong supporter of it, but it has been
obvious for the last few years that the Dominions or Colonial
Offices wish to terminate the Mandate System and when Stanley was
here last December, we were asked to meet him and he said that the
British were determined to substitute a system of regional
associations like the Caribbean. I pointed out that this was no
substitute for the Mandate System and it would only crystallise
the sort of opinion that existed in the particular area. I
instanced South Africa. I said that the essence of the system of
mandates was the principle of accountability to an independent
authority. He didn't like this a bit as others who were at the
meeting will testify. Then he gave a lecture in New York in which
he described these regional groups and made no reference to any
reports. On this a group of American publicists, interested in
mandates, wrote a letter to the New York Times asking his views on
accountability and no reply was made to it. You know better than I
do what took place in London, but I understand that after opposing
a trusteeship system in the first stage, it was referred to the
Cabinet and then the British agreed to some form of trusteeship. I
think it is quite clear that if it had not been for Australian and
New Zealand pressure the question of trusteeship would have been
sidestepped, at any rate by the British. The Americans found there
was a widespread demand of absolute ownership for the islands
conquered from Japan by the United States and though the State
Department wanted a limited form for the islands detached from
Japan, I think they would have also avoided the issue. Under the
circumstances, I do not think it was unnatural for Evatt to resent
strongly the claim by Halifax that the British played a leading
part in the trusteeship chapter of the Charter and I think justice
should be done to him in this respect. I don't think that anything
can be done in public, but if the matter is mentioned in
conversation, it may be possible to prevent this matter from
reacting to the disadvantage of Australia.

The main issues, apart from the Economic & Social Council and
Trusteeship, were the powers of the Security Council, and
especially the veto power and the powers of the General Assembly.

Our attempt was to cut down the veto to the enforcement provisions
of the Charter and to increase the powers of recommendation by the
General Assembly. The people who proposed this concurrent vote of
the Five Powers never seemed to realise that it meant a veto and
that if it is applied to the whole machinery of the United Nations
Organisation, it could be used to paralyse it. It could be used to
prevent proceedings for conciliation and it could also be used
after a decision for enforcement has been taken to prevent
subsequent steps. As The Times in its article reviewing San
Francisco says, 'there is no system of selective security under
the new organisation' and I think that is a sorry conclusion to
arrive at after a second world war.

There was a certain amount of friction between the British
Delegation and our Delegation on this and also on the powers of
the Assembly, but this was mainly due to the extraordinary tactics
employed by the British of taking the whole burden of defending
the veto. They put up people like Dingle Foot [3] and Miss
Horsbrugh [4] on committees on which I sat to defend the positions
and I am sure that Dingle Foot didn't believe in it a bit. Our
feeling was that, although Russia had been most insistent on it,
the United States was equally insistent: the other three powers
not nearly so keen on it. This brought, of course, the British and
Australians into opposite camps and we felt that the British might
have gained a point if they wanted it, if they had only been
tougher with the other two. This may merely be speculation. The
fact is that Russia did give way at the last moment on matters on
which she had been most insistent. There was quite a curious fear
by the British that we would wreck the conference by carrying the
matter too far. We had always said that we would vote for the
third reading, even if we did not get the amendments and I don't
think there was any justification for the British attitude. The
rudeness was not all on one side; some of the British delegates,
such as C.K. Webster [5] and the Foreign Office representatives,
were very rude indeed. Webster is a very dogmatic man, talks
everybody down and refers to their arguments as poppycock. He did
as much harm on his side as anything done on the other side.

I said in the meeting at the British Embassy afterwards, that I
was very unhappy about the Charter because wars were not caused by
small powers, but by the rivalries of great powers. Halifax
interrupted me by saying that the only remedy for that is the
virtue of the great powers. Surely a man who had gone through the
period of 1930 and 1939 must have realized that in a period of
tension, there is no room for virtue, that everybody is forced to
measures of expediency. We got an awful lot of rubbish such as the
statement that the Charter is based on the principle of the
unanimity of the great powers. The organisation cannot act at all
unless they are unanimous, but there is nothing in the Charter to
secure unanimity, no pressure can be exerted on a great power. The
idea also that the big powers are responsible for peace is equally
nonsensical; the fact is that the great powers take no
responsibility for peace except to enforce peace among the small
power. You must not take it that Evatt's campaign was merely a
small powers vs. a great power campaign. It was a campaign against
the defective principles of the Charter. It certainly brought a
number of rather undesirable small powers on his side, such as the
Latinos and the Arabs. I suppose that cannot be helped. You must
not take this letter as a defence of Evatt. What I want to do is
to show that we had right on our side and must not be penalised
because Evatt got a bad name.

We were very distressed to hear of the death of Curtin. Evatt had
left by boat from San Francisco just about four hours before the
announcement.

I have been complaining, ever since I came here, about the lack of
staff and all that has happened is that Dr. Evatt has created two
new posts and is creating a Consulate General in New York and I am
asked to help staff these posts from Washington.

F. W. EGGLESTON