Peace

COLOMBIA-PERU

Among the belongings of the League of Nations is a great inkstand of ivory and gold. The well is an imperial crown, supported by two antelope horns which statesmen have likened to the horns of a Dilemma. It was a present from His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie. Power of

Trinity I, Emperor of Abyssinia, and it is to be used only for signing peace treaties.

Neglected year after year, lackeys proudly dusted it off and filled it to the brim. Rapidly losing her appetite for war after the assassination of pugnacious President Luis M. Sanchez Cerro. Peru had agreed to accept the League formula for the settlement of her undeclared war with Colombia over the seizure of Leticia last September. The settlement:

1) Peruvian troops which seized Leticia must withdraw immediately.sb

2) A League commission is to be appointed at once, proceed to Leticia within the next 30 days to rule Leticia as a League mandate for not more than one year.

3 ) The League commission will have its own private army, composed of "internationalized" Colombian soldiers to enforce its bidding.

4) Colombia will pay all expenses of the commission and its army.

5) Colombia and Peru to proceed immediately toward final arbitration of the question.

Colombia's Eduardo Santos and Peru's Francisco Garcia Calderon dipped the Imperial ivory gift-pen deep in the Abyssinian inkwell and signed. Cried Senor Santos:

"Our peoples have agreed that they ought not to fight each other but to unite against hostile nature. . . . Any war in Spanish America is a fratricidal war."

Deeply moved by this love feast after so much bickering in Geneva among other nations, France's eloquent Foreign Minister Joseph Paul-Boncour cried:

"For us, too, in our old Europe, the mother of remote civilization, any war must be a fratricidal war, and we thank you for reminding us."

sbA grimy little port on the Upper Amazon, named by a romantic engineer for a Miss Leticia Smith (who married someone else), Leticia was ceded by Peru to Colombia in 1922. Its population remained predominantly Peruvian.

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