Council Sits

When the Council of the League of Nations sat down to its June session in Geneva, last week, two famed faces were absent. One is nude, plump, confident; the other shaggily mustached, and lined with weary wrinkles. As everyone knows, these are respectively the faces of German Foreign Minister Dr. Gustav Stresemann and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand. Both are slowly convalescing from illness.

Accordingly, Germany was represented on the Council, last week, by that veteran pre-War and post-War "career diplomat," Dr. von Schubert, now Assistant Foreign Minister. Came in behalf of France her reputedly richest citizen, M. Louis Loucheur, not long since Finance Minister. (TIME, Dec. 28, 1925). Just prior to leaving Paris last week, M. Loucheur accepted the post of Minister of Labor, replacing unlucky M. Andre Falliere, who lost his parliamentary seat in the recent French election (TIME, April 30, May 7).

During sessions of the League Assembly, M. Loucheur usually sits next to the aisle-and-front-row-seat of his friend, Aristide Briand. On such occasions the richest man in France frequently leaves and returns to his seat by leaping nimbly over the top of his desk, in order to avoid disturbing Great Aisle Seater Briand. Last week, however, French Representative Loucheur leaped for no man.

Present as the only Foreign Minister of a Great Power to attend was Sir Austen Chamberlain, jovial to fellow diplomats, glacial to the press, British.

Questions. Up before the Council were three vital questions upon which it had delayed to act for months or years: 1) Shall the Rumanian Government pay compensation for lands expropriated by it from Hungarian citizens? (TIME, Sept. 26); 2) Should the League fix responsibility and apply censure in the matter of the Italian arms which were smuggled into Hungary in defiance of the Treaty of Trianon? (TIME, March 5); 3) Shall the Baltic city of Vilna belong to Poland (now holding it by authority of the Allied Council of Ambassadors); or to Lithuania (which received Vilna from Soviet Russia under a treaty signed between those states in 1920)?