document in the history of international co-operation. As Woodrow Wilson declared when presenting the Covenant at Versailles, “a living thing is born”. Provenance: from the estate of Louis Lichtenstein Strauss (1896–1974). Strauss left the family wholesale shoe business when America entered the First World War in 1917 and took himself to Washington where he persuaded Herbert Hoover to give him a job in the newly formed Food Administration. Impressed with Strauss, Hoover took him on as his private secretary, Strauss accompanying him to Paris at the end of the war to assist in running the American Relief Administration. A distinguished career in banking followed. During the Second World War he was the only naval reservist to rise to the rank of rear admiral for his work for the Bureau of Ordnance, and in 1946 he became the first chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission. A well-provenanced and preserved copy of this world-historical document. 4 single leaves (300 × 210 mm), printed rectos only, wire-stitched in original pale green hammer-finish card wrappers, letterpress title as above. Staples renewed slightly askew from their original positions, mild rust-marks, wrappers otherwise clean and sharp, paper uniformly toned, overall very good. £7,500 [132162] 93 LEANG-LI, T’Ang (ed.) Reconstruction in China. Shanghai: China United Press, 1935 First edition in English, first printing, of this comprehensive propagandistic account of the reconstruction of China since the foundation of the Republic of China in January 1912. The work was simultaneously published in French and German. Leang-li (1901–1970) was a journalist and politician who, in 1929, was appointed chief of the Communications Office to Europe for the Republic. Educated in England and Vienna, Leang-li was appointed as an adviser to the Foreign Ministry
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92 LEAGUE OF NATIONS. Covenant. [Draft Covenant of the League of Nations.] ?Paris: February 1919 “A living thing is born” First and only printing of this original draft, docketed on the front wrapper by Louis L. Strauss, Herbert Hoover’s assistant in Paris: “One of the first 100 copies of the original draft. Read by Woodrow Wilson at Paris, Feb. 1919”. Library Hub locates just six copies of this draft: Peace Palace Library, Huntington, Princeton, Harvard Law School, Wellesley, Missouri. Drafted by Cecil Hurst, principal legal advisor to the Foreign Office, and David Hunter Miller, a member of Woodrow Wilson’s investigative group “the Inquiry” and chief of the legal section of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, the draft was presented on 14 February 1919. In the ensuing four months a designated commission met on ten occasions to thrash out the terms of the founding covenant, attempting to overcome major objections raised by various participants. A revised draft was finally approved on 11 April 1919, but without resolving key questions such as national and racial equality, and what practical methods of enforcement could be applied to the League’s mandates. Despite this the treaty entered into force on 10 January 1920. However, for America Article X – which undertook “to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all States members of the League” – remained highly contentious for isolationist elements in government and the Senate refused to ratify it. Nonetheless this statement, and the striving for mutual understanding that it represents, is a foundation
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WEALTH AND WELFARE
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