THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

hoped to get the League to acknowledge publicly the creation
•of the International University by accepting the patronage of
it, perhaps even supporting it financially. Third, they hoped
to receive a subsidy from the League to carry out part of
their publishing program for the UIA. Once again Nitobe
had a specific plan. Before the War, the second World Congress
of the UIA had discussed the possibility of compiling
all the various resolutions of international conferences into
a single document, what became known as a Code des Voeux. 7
Nitobe thought this a project in which the League might be
interested and later Otlet and La Fontaine were informed that
Drummond would be prepared to recommend to the League's
Council that they be granted a subsidy of £1,500 (or 90,000
French francs) if they agreed to complete and publish it. 8
When the Council of the League had a series of meetings
at San Sebastien and at Rome in the middle of 1920, Otlet
and La Fontaine addressed letters to Drummond, Leon Bourgeois,
then French Minister to and President of the Council
and to Jules Destree, the Belgian minister to the Council,
urging the League to accept the patronage of the International
University and to create an organ for intellectual work
at the League. Destree had not replied to an earlier letter
requesting his intervention in the Council's deliberations on
"behalf of the UIA and had been sent an anxious telegram
:soon after. Now he received a long, flattering letter. Otlet
puts his case thus:
224
The Belgians say: there is a political League of Nations. There is
an intellectual and economic League of Nations. You have set up
first in Geneva; the second, represented until now by the international
associations, is installed in Brussels. It has a Centre there; it is
growing bigger; every day it receives new elements. The League of
Nations, as a State does for national associations, should help the
international associations — patronage and subsidy. That is the general
idea. It has already received a blessing. By official letter of the
1st May, the Secretariat of the League has informed us that it will
contribute a sum of £1500 (90,000 French francs) for the publication
of the... Code des Voeux. This work is destined to serve as the basis
for the work of the congresses at Brussels in September next. The
principle of co-operation between our Union and the League is already
established. Moreover, M. Leon Bourgeois agrees completely
with the resolution we presented and reviewed a year ago, that there
should be created at the League a Bureau, analagous to that for
work,... charged primarily with being an organ of liaison with the
International Associations of an intellectual order.
We ask that protection granted... [The Red Cross] be extended to
all the free international associations of importance, and already, in
a document published by Sir Eric Drummond's Secretariat in co-operation
with our Union (Liste des Associations Internationales, Introduction),
this point seems to have been recognised in principle.
Here are the elements of the situation. One should make them concrete
in an immediately practical formula for us, leaving developments
to the f uture: that the International University now formed by the