(Due to arrive Melbourne-24.4.26)

My dear P.M.,

I feel that it would be very cold porridge to confine myself to a
dreary reiteration of the suggestions and countersuggestions that
made up the Special March Assembly of the League. A mere catalogue
of the efforts made to get Germany in and to slam the door on as
many other Council aspirants as possible would not, I think, be
very instructive. [1] Anyhow, you have been kept well informed by
telegraph of the day to day ebb and flow of the negotiations.

I propose, therefore, to confine this letter to some observations
that seem to me to be of interest, on the assumption that you know
the general thread of the story.

Broadly speaking, the first week of the Session was confined to
dealing with Poland's efforts to get a seat of some sort on the
Council-Brazil and Spain on the one hand and Sweden on the other
being rather vague dangers lurking in the background. Only when
the Polish difficulty had been overcome by Sweden and
Czechoslovakia offering to resign their non-permanent seats and (it
was hoped) be replaced by Poland and Norway, did people realise
that an even greater menace to a settlement existed in the shape
of Brazil.

Great Britain's and France's entanglements with Poland and Spain,
combined with a misunderstanding (no worse, I think) at Locarno as
to the conditions under which Germany was to join the Council of
the League, were together responsible for the start of the
trouble.

When Spain and Brazil recognised the strength of the cards they
held, they both resorted to open blackmail to gain their ends.

The open evidence of blackmail on the part of Spain was contained
in the fact that she sent her Ambassador at Stockholm to inform
the Swedish Foreign Office that if they persisted in their
intention of blackballing Spain for a permanent seat on the
Council, she (Spain) would cancel their mutual trade agreement.

Brazil's threat, which she implemented, was that unless she were
given a permanent seat on the Council, she would blackball
Germany.

The whole episode was calculated to make a very bad impression on
anyone who looks to the honour and fairmindedness of the
individual members of the League to do the right and decent thing
in any big future crisis.

One result that one hopes will come out of it all is that the
Council will in future not be so ready to take so much on
themselves in secret session. Secret round table diplomacy with a
lot of people round the table has had its first big failure. The
'light and air' that the League is meant to shed on negotiations
was absent at this session.

The views of a large number of the smaller States were expressed
by Nansen [2] (Norway) when he said in his speech at the final
meeting of the Assembly that 'the machinery of the League had not
been used at all and that it had been attempted to do the business
by private conversations and without any public sessions at all of
either the Council or the Assembly'. A number of representatives
of the smaller States have undoubtedly been very annoyed at being
summoned to an Assembly at which a matter of great importance to
the League was under discussion, and then not being given an
opportunity to do more than listen to the rumours that escaped
from the closed doors of the private Council meetings.

However, the answer that I have been given when I have put this
point of view to members of the British Delegation is as follows:-

That the subject which dominated the first week of this session
was the question between France and Germany over the introduction
of Poland, and that this was preeminently a question of such
delicacy that it could not be discussed and any equitable solution
arrived at in public session without arousing a storm of public
opinion in France adverse to Germany. It was only towards the end
of the Assembly that it was realised that the real bar to a
solution was Brazil and that her attitude was not mere bluff that
could easily be liquidated. It is admitted that if Brazil and
Spain had been the only difficulty, their blackmailing tactics
would have been more easily disposed of in open session, when the
public opinion of all the disinterested world could have been
allowed to concentrate on them.

The opinion of responsible members of the League Secretariat is
that the negotiations have been allowed to come to an end too soon
and before all the means at the disposal of the League had been
exhausted. Major Abraham [3], an Englishman of considerable
ability in the Political Section, thinks that something might have
come of a resolution of the Assembly to refer the matter back to
open session of the First Committee, let them work on it for three
days and have them report again to a Plenary Session of the
Assembly. It is a matter of opinion whether any good could have
come of this or whether this would not have merely resulted in
recriminations aimed at Brazil which would have brought her
friends and semi-supporters out into the open, and so widened the
breach instead of bridging it.

One quite obvious outcome of the whole thing is that Chamberlain
[4] will emerge with very much lowered prestige. He played Locarno
for all it was worth between November and now until people were
rather tired of the sentimentality contained in his invoking of
the 'Locarno spirit'.

Presumably this spirit of sweet reasonableness led him to pledge
himself, morally at least, to Spain and to a lesser extent to
Poland. This was the beginning of his undoing. The completion of
his undoing to my mind has been the stubborn insistence of an
ultra-honest man on implementing his promise to Spain. This
undoubtedly heightened the hopes and steeled the resolve of Spain
to use every artifice to bring off a permanent seat for herself,
as she realised that she would never have a better opportunity.

This selfish activity on Spain's part induced similar activity on
the part of Poland and Brazil. The broadcast statement that H.M.G.

was not opposed to additional Council seats gave heart and hope to
all three, prolonged their insistence on having their claims
heard, and created this deadlock position by reason of each
country advertising its claims and allowing the satisfaction of
their claims to become a matter of national honour.

If Great Britain had taken up a firm position in the first place
that she would, at this Assembly, back no claims except Germany's,
I don't think this trouble would have eventuated, as public
opinion in Spain, Poland and Brazil would never have been
encouraged to crystallise. This was the undoubted opinion of the
F.O. (in reality, if not in word), of the Cabinet, of the country
and of the Dominions. However, Chamberlain flew in the teeth of
the gale of public opinion and induced the Cabinet to give him
what he called 'room to manoeuvre', which meant a mandate to back
Spain as long as he could and, if he failed, to let her down as
lightly as possible.

The German point of view cannot altogether be said to be without
justification. She may have been wrong to have tacitly assumed at
Locarno that no one else except herself would be elected to the
Council in March. Chamberlain says that the matter was never
discussed. If she honestly thought that she was to have come into
the Council as it then existed, then she may rightly have thought
that she was being tricked when she saw France leading in Poland
by the hand and Great Britain Spain at the same time.

Theoretically, a dominating Latin group in the Council can effect
nothing if Germany is there to block it by preventing unanimity.

But such a cabal of anti-German opinion on the Council would
undoubtedly tend to thwart Germany and would no doubt attempt to
make her the black sheep of the League by pointing to her as being
the obstructionist on the Council time after time.

It is a matter for speculation as to the extent to which other
powers secretly backed Brazil. There is a strong feeling that
Italy was at her elbow. I have never heard any more convincing
argument to back this view than that Mussolini is known to be
impatient of the League and presumably would rejoice at anything
that undermined its authority and prestige. The League curbed his
activities at Corfu and might be expected to do so again, if his
policy of expansion ever took active shape. Also, Brazil is a
large and growing field for Italian emigration. Rumour in certain
quarters says that the Marquis Theodoli (Chairman, Permanent
Mandates Commission) was the agent provocateur for Italy in the
matter and, if nothing else, was the spreader of rumour that
heartened the Brazilians.

Then there is the theory that France was secretly behind Brazil.

There is some circumstantial evidence of this but I think that it
is rather too Machiavellian to be credible.

Several responsible men on the Secretariat, whom I know well
enough to hear their real opinion, consider that the blame should
not fall wholly on Brazil (whom they nevertheless consider very
unworthy opportunists), but must be shared by Great Britain and
France, who were the directing heads of the negotiations and who
they consider allowed themselves to be out-manoeuvred.

The Secretariat generally are at the moment very depressed and
consider that the League has had a great setback. They think that
it is doubtful now if the Economic Conference or the Preliminary
Disarmament Conference will come to anything in view of the loss
of face of the League in the eyes of the world, and in particular,
in view of the absence of Germany whose cooperation it was hoped
would have been secured in both these investigations. Personally I
think they are rather unduly depressed at their first big setback
and that they will see matters more calmly in a month or so's
time.

I cannot bring myself to believe that Briand [5] was even
indirectly pleased at Germany being turned away from Geneva.

Rumour was not slow to lay some subtle machinations at his door,
but I think, after talking to numerous people about it, that it is
all nonsense. Briand is very far from being a Poincare. [6] I
firmly believe that Briand was as honestly grieved as Chamberlain
at the Geneva failure.

As to Chamberlain himself, one cannot but be very sorry for him.

As time went on at Geneva and difficulty after difficulty
presented itself, like heads bobbing up at an Aunt Sally booth, he
got more and more worried and distraught. He never has had the
gift of clear-cut concise language, and he became less and less
able to explain the position shortly and to marshal all the
factors for the Dominion representatives. His talks at the
combined British Delegation meetings became longwinded stories of
detailed negotiations out of which it was difficult to pick the
main thread of the story. I was myself frequently unable to
correlate the story, as I had it hour by hour from his staff, with
his long drawn-out version of it as he retailed it himself.

At one meeting, at which all he really had to tell us was that the
Germans stood firm, and that he was at a loss as to what to do
next, he got quite emotional and went into an explanation of how
he saw the achievement of his life of which he was most proud-
Locarno-crumbling to pieces. If one wanted any confirmation of it,
I am now more than ever convinced that he is far from being a
heaven-sent Foreign Secretary -much as one is conscious of-and
tries to avoid-the common failing of all of us to kick a man when
he is down.

I am, Yours sincerely,
R. G. CASEY