On January 10, 1920 The League of Nations came into existence. The headquarters was in Geneva Switzerland.

Its main purpose was to settle international disputes. Woodrow Wilson was the person behind the League although the League was really similar suggestions put together during World War I. Wilson made it his point to make the League covenant part of each separate peace treaty.

The two main aims of the League were collective security if a member state was attacked the other states would come together to defend the victim, and to encourage international co-operation to solve economic and social problems.

The League was organised into several different bodies. The biggest body was the General Assembly which met annually. Its purpose was to decide general policy.

The council was smaller than the Assembly with four permanent members and nine non-permanent by 1926, while the Assembly had representatives from each member state.

It met at least three times a year and dealt with specific political disputes the Permanent Court of International Justice was another body of the League which was situated at the League in Holland. It consisted of 15 judges of different nationalities and dealt with legal disputes.

The Secretariat looked after all the paper work, prepared agendas and wrote resolutions and reports carrying out the decisions of the League. There were also committees and commissions. Mandates, military affairs, minority groups and disarmaments were handled by the main commissions.

There were committees for international labour, health, economic and financial organisation, child welfare, drug problems and women's rights.

There were many successes of the League. The International Labour Organisation had the most success. It was led by Albert Thomas and was to improve labour conditions all over the world.

The Refugee Organisation was led by explorer, Fridtjof Nansen. It helped many former prisoners back home after the war. The Health Organisation investigated the cause of epidemics, especially the typhus epidemics in Russia. The Mandates Commissions supervised the government of the territories taken from Germany and Turkey.

The scar was under a different mandates commissions there was a quarrel between Sweden and Finland over Aaland Islands. Germany and Poland both wanted upper, Silesia (it was partitioned between them). The Greeks invaded Bulgaria and later the Greeks withdrew and paid for damages. Turkey claimed the province of Moscul. Squabbles between Peru and Colombia and Bolivia and Paraguay were settled.

The League also had a number of failures. First of all, it was too similar to the Treaty of Versailles. In March 1920 The United States Senate rejected the Versailles settlement and the League because Americans wanted to be isolated once again and the Republicans opposed Woodrow Wilson who was a Democrat.

Germany and Russia were not allowed to join the League until late and deprived it from the most important powers. Before the League came about there was another organisation called the Conference of Ambassadors in Paris. It was supposed to operate until the League came into effect, but it continued.

On several occasions when the League would make a decision, the Conference would object and cause trouble. It was hard to ensure that decisive action was taken against any aggressor because of the weaknesses in the Covenant. The absence of USA and USSR also put strain on the League. This, and because it made the League like a Franco-British affair, caused the other states to refrain from aggression and accept the League's decisions. When the world economic crisis began in 1929 it brought along unemployment and falling living standards to most countries.(They refused).

Japan, Germany and Missolini refused to keep to the rules and pursued a series of actions which revealed the League's weakness and contributed to the League's decline. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and China appealed to the League and the League ordered that Japan withdraw and Manchuria be a part of the League.

Japan rejected the order and withdrew from the League in 1933.

The World disarmament conference was a failure because Germany wanted equality of armaments with France, who wanted to put it off for another eight years at the last.

The most serious reason why the League was a failure was because of the invasion of Abyssinia by (Italy) in October 1935. The League condemned Italy and was punished economically, but the punishment was so half-hearted Italy was able to finish her quest with Abyssinia.

In closing, it can be said that the League had its ups and downs and had consisted of important bodies.

The League had many successes and all of them did a good job in solving their problems.

It also had its down points. The down points contributed heavily to the failures. If the League organised and the states were not so competitive, the League would have worked. The bodies of the League were well organised each and division was run fairly.

JAQUITA INGHAM Year 5, The Berkeley Institute.