ABOLITION OF CUSTOMS.

FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT. GENEVA, Friday.

Today’s proceedings in the Assembly were on the whole very dull and uninteresting. The sitting was mainly occupied by two long speeches, one by M. Lafontaine, the veteran Belgian Labour leader, the other by Dr. Nansen, dealing with the Russian famine. When the sitting opened M. Lafontaine ascended the tribune. He is a tall, drooping, melancholy figure, and his address was in keeping with his appearance. It was a long jeremiad on the woes of the world, social. economic, military, and financial, and the speaker could see no ray of hope anywhere. All over the world there was misery. Even in the United States six millions were unemployed, and thirty millions were starving in Russia. Yet if they turned to the report of the Council of the League there was not a single reference to this appalling state of affairs. He preferred to look at the world as a cosmopolitan. The delegates should forget they were the representatives of a particular country, and consider themselves as representatives of the fatherland of humanity, the world.

M. Lafontaine then referred to the delay in ratifying the statutes of the International Court of Justice. It took from December .to July last to secure sufficient ratifications to assure the establishment of the Court. This showed great distrust of this instrument of international justice, not on the part of the peoples, but of the Governments, and the Court could not but be troubled by this attitude. The League of Nations should, he thought, be more active in promoting disarmament, and he went on to describe the horrors of the next war, which the progress of aviation would cause to be fought, not on distant battlefields, but in cities and ports. It would be a war against women, children, and old people in their very homes. Nothing which had ever occurred could equal it. It would be a veritable suicide of humanity,