"Die Sitzung"

Events crowding a busy seven days at Geneva, following the first opening of the Council of the League of Nations in German (TIME, March 14), by the German Foreign Minister, Dr. Gustav Stresemann, who spoke the four historic opening words: "Ich offne die sitzung:"

P: The Annual report of the League of Nations "white slavery" Committee* revealed that the Panama Canal Zone is now one of the chief headquarters of this international traffic. Portugal was stigmatized because the Portuguese law still allows girls as young as 14 years to be registered and licensed. The Mediterranean lands are declared the chief source of "white slaves," and Latin America is the principal consumer region. During the reading of the Committee's report--signed by its U. S. Chairman, William F. Snow--a member of the French delegation rose to protest the Committee's translation of tenanciere into English as "madame." Tenanciere, he protested, meant a woman who kept disorderly premises; and madame is the ordinary title of married Frenchwomen. Tiems! Did the Committee propose to slander at one stroke all the honest wives of France? . . .

Soon indulgent Anglo-Saxons explained that in this special connection "madame" has become de facto an English word, and that the Committee knew of no other sufficiently polite English word to express its meaning.

P: The Council heard a preliminary report on educational conditions in Polish Upper Silesia where there is a large "German minority." Controversy spirals up from the complaints of Germans that their children are being forced to learn Polish, and the retort of Poles that the students really are Polish and that it would merely be pampering their misguided German parents to educate these children in German.

P: During the week French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand and British Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain, both representing their countries at the Council table, made good use of leisure moments to persuade German Foreign Minister Stresemann and Polish Foreign Minister August Zaleski, to resume pourparlers for a German-Polish commercial entente which had seemed to be breaking down of late. Once again was seen the peculiar, inherent importance of League sessions--they bring into peaceful personal contact statesmen who might otherwise quarrel over the telegraph.

P: Colonel Daniel MacCormack, Bostonian, hard working Director of Persian Internal Revenue, announced a standing offer by Persia to curtail her opium production 10% whenever the morphin, cocaine and heroin producing countries/- should agree to a similar curtailment of their drug production. Said Colonel MacCormack: "We know that 5,000 tons of opium are produced annually throughout the world, while there is legitimate need for less than 400. . . ."

*i. e. The Committee to Study Traffic in Women and Children.

*Lecturer-Physician.

/- Germany, Holland, Switzerland, France, Japan, England, U. S.