388 THE BRITISH APPROACH TO POLITICS

recent growth, and there are many States with far less experience.
The Health Organisation of the League, by collecting statistics
and arranging exchange visits between public servants of difierent
nationalities, pools the available knowledge. Men and women
engaged in medical research are put into touch with their fellow-
workers. When new ideas are being tested, the results of experi-
ments throughout the world can be tabulated. Unnecessary
repetition of work by different scientists, ignorant of each other's
progress, can be avoided. The Organisation has been of great
value to nations with undeveloped health services; nor has the
gain been confined to them. A people whose health is undermined
by tuberculosis will have a low standard of life and be but a poor
market for other nations. The knowledge of how to fight malaria
brings into mankind's use regions previously uninhabitable.
The conquest of cholera, plague and other diseases which can be
borne by ships, is the concern of all. Through the Health Organ-
isation quarantine rules have been made more effective. The
Eastern Bureau of the Organisation, at Singapore, receives
weekly information from some 160 ports round the Pacific and
Indian Oceans, and news of any outbreak is spread at once
throughout this area.

The Coipmittee of Intellectual Co-operation similarly connects
workers in every field of science and art. The results of different
educational methods can be compared in the light of collected
evidence. Some progress has been made with a difficult and
important problem—the revision of school history-books so that
they shall not present to the rising generation false accounts
calculated to keep old hatreds alive.

The social and economic work of the League has been utilised
to great effect in China. The Government of General Chiang
Kai-Shek has many defects; but over great areas it wages
increasingly successful war against floods and disease, and was
reorganising the finances of the State. Throughout this work,
now hampered by the war with Japan, experts appointed by the
economic and social organisations assist the Government,