This worki edited by Andrew W. Cordier, president of Columbia University and former executive assistant to the Secretary-General, and Wilder Foote, the United Nations' former director of press and publications, is a further addition to the expanding literature on the office of secretary-general. The introduction repeats the now familiar story that the League's first secretary-general, Sir Eric Drummond, established the concept of the non-political secretariat and especially the non-political secretary-general. Thus the subsequent public political activities and initiatives, not to mention the non-public ones, of the first United secretary-general, Norway's Trygve Lie, were a major departure from the League experience, or as the editors describe it, the pioneering course pursued by the first Secretary-General of the United Nations (p. 1). Though the League's secretary-general, the editors tell us, often a private consultant to Governments, he avoided public stands on political (p. 2). He skirted debates in the League Council and Assembly and avoided acting as a spokesman for the Covenant's principles and for the League as a world institution. Recent evidence, however, tends to show that Sir Eric was more than a trusted private consultant to Governments especially to his own.2 That he took no public stands on political questions is of course quite true, but his private stands with interested governments more than offset his public silence. Indeed, Drummond's successor, the Frenchman Joseph Avenol, who is not even mentioned as though one would like to forget an erring son -through his machinations in private went a long way