The proceedings of the first meeting of Committee No. 9 can be best reported in the words of the Assembly Journal for the following day. This journal, with its terse and yet detailed accounts of current happenings, its polite yet lucid style, and its red-hot topicality (for it is truly a journal), makes admirable reading for those who like their literature up-to-date. Those who attend the meetings of the Assembly are, as a matter of fact, excellently well-provided by the enterprise of the Secretariat with literature. A delegated or a journalist's pigeon-hole is far better than a circulating library. New every morning is the supply, and those who, in their spare hours, like a nice lie down and a nice read (all in two languages) shall have for their entertainment the Assembly Journal for the day, the Verbatim Record of the last meetings of the Assembly and Committees, selected press opinions of the affair (these are often very entertaining, and journalists approach them with the additional interest engendered by the hope that the comments they themselves have sent home to their papers may have been selected for quotation: in passing it may be observed that Henry Beechtree had, in this matter, no luck), and all kinds of documents dealing with every kind of matter--the Traffic in Women, Children, and Opium, the admission of a new State to the League, international disputes, disagreeable telegrams from one country about another, the cost of living in Geneva, the organisation of International Statistics, International Health, or International Education, the Economic Weapon of the League, the status or the frontiers of a Central European state, the desirability of a greater or a less great publicity, messages from the Esperanto Congress, and so on and so forth; every kind of taste is, in fact, catered for. To quote, then, the Journal for the day after the first meeting of the Committee for Dealing with the Disappearance of Delegates:-- "Committee No. IX. met yesterday, Wednesday, Sept. 8th, at 3.30 p.m., under the chairmanship of M. Croza (Paraguay). "The Chairman pointed out that the agenda before the Committee fell under several heads:-- "1. Deprecation of baseless suspicions and malicious aspersions. "2. Investigation into possible or probable motives for the assaults. "3. Consideration of the adoption of precautionary measures to safeguard in future the persons of delegates. "4. Organisation of complete house to house search of the city of Geneva by police. "5. Consideration of various suspicions based on reason and common sense. "In order to carry on these lines of inquiry, five sub-committees were appointed, each of which would report to the plenary committee day by day.