A brief account of the Association's method of doing business may be
interesting. Meetings are held once in two years, in the month of
September, different towns in Switzerland being selected in turn for the
place of assembly. The four conferences which I personally attended as
British delegate took place in Geneva, Lucerne, Lugano, and Zurich.
There are two plenary assemblies, the first having as chief business,
apart from the hearing of introductory addresses, the appointment of the
five commissions into which the conference splits up for actual work;
the second meeting to receive the reports of these commissions and their
recommendations, and decide upon the adoption or rejection of the
latter. The trilingual rule is followed, delegates addressing the
assembly either in French, German, or English, as they prefer, each
speech being followed by a brief _resume_ in the other two languages
from the interpreter. In the commissions, by an unwritten but generally
accepted custom, French and German are the only languages used.
(Latterly the representatives of the United States of America, with the
individualistic courage that becomes them, have shown a disposition to
rebel against this custom and defy it; but the close of the Zurich
meeting left it uncertain whether in this particular the New World will
be able to prevail over the Old.) In the dignified speech-making of the
General Assembly the recurrent changes of language, if a little
disconcerting at first, can be faced with tolerable equanimity; but when
it is a question of the quicker verbal sword-play which goes on in the
commissions, the member imperfect in the tongues finds his position
occasionally difficult. The sympathies of every humane person must go
out to the expert who, having just made a telling _expose_ of his case
in French well practised for the occasion, encounters a crushing
rejoinder in German of which he can barely follow the general drift.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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