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IX. Viscount Cecil, the Government and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1931
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
It is often suggested that the Far Eastern crisis of 1931–3 marked tlie beginning of the Second World War, that ‘the road… is now clearly visible… from the railway tracks near Mukden to the operations of two bombers over Hiroshima and Nagasaki’. In many eyes, too, this episode was also crucial for die League of Nations and the cause of collective security, an opportunity to vindicate the peace-keeping machinery of 1919 which, had it been taken, might have proved decisive in preventing the slide into international anarchy which followed. ‘This has been the vital test for the League,’ Philip Noel-Baker wrote to Gilbert Murray at the time, ’-– and the greatest opportunity it has ever had, especially in view of U.S.A. cooperation’. When Japan had triumphed nearly two years later, he saw the whole structure of organized international co-operation as being ‘in grave danger’, and the League as ‘never having sunk to so low an ebb in influence and prestige’.
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References
1 Stimson, Henry L. and Bundy, McGeorge, On Active Service in Peace and War (Harper, N.Y., 1948), p. 221.Google Scholar
2 See, for instance, Walters, F. P., A History of the League of Nations (Oxford University Press. 1960), pp. 467 and 499;Google ScholarCecil, Lord, A Great Experiment (Jonathan Cape, 1941), pp. 235–6.Google Scholar
3 Gilbert Murray Papers (Bodleian Library); letter of 11 Oct. 1931.
4 Cecil of Chelwood Papers (British Museum), Add. 51108; Noel-Baker memorandum of 5 July 1933. Cf. Gooch, G. P., ‘Some Consequences of the Sino-Japanese Dispute’, in The Problems of Peace (London, 1933),Google Scholar and Toynbee, A. J., Survey of International Affairs, 1933 (Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. 517–8.Google Scholar
I am grateful to the Rt. Hon. Philip Noel-Baker for permission to quote from his letters of the time, and to Professor Ann Lambton for similar permission relating to material in the Cecil Papers. My colleague Peter Calvocoiessi was kind enough to make helpful comments on the first draft of the article.
5 For accounts of the Japanese side of these events, see, for instance, Crowley, J. B., Japan's Quest For Autonomy (Princeton University Press, 1966);Google ScholarYoshihashi, Takehiko, Conspiracy at Mukden (Yale University Press, 1963);Google Scholar and Ogata, S. N., Defiance in Manchuria (University of California Press, 1964).Google ScholarThe Report of the League of Nations Commission of Enquiry (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1932) remains of great value, as do the typescript ‘Documents and Proceedings of the International Military Tribunal of the Far East’, of which there is a set in the Imperial War Museum.
6 In The Baldwin Age, ed. Raymond, John (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1960), p. 98,Google Scholar Mr Noel-Baker writes simply that ‘Henderson often said that, if he had still been in office, he could have used the League to turn (the Japanese) out’. This is argument-by-implication, of a kind that avoids having to raise the formidable questions involved. The same writer argues in similar fashion in an obituary notice on Sir Alexander Cadogan (The Times, 15 July 1968): ‘Cadogan knew that, with a Simon lead, and with Stimson's help from Washington, the League could stop the Japanese in Manchuria.’
7 The other President was Viscount Grey of Falloden; Baldwin, Clynes and Lloyd George were Honorary Presidents, and Gilbert Murray was Chairman of an Executive Committee which included Norman Angel, Philip Noel-Baker, David Davies, the Earl of Lytton and Professor A. E. Zimmern. Sir Austen Chamberlain joined the Committee in February 1932, thereby increasing the amount of dissension within it.
8 This note declared that the United States would not recognize the legality of any situation or treaty between Japan and China which might impair United States treaty rights or which had been brought about by means contrary to the Pact of Paris. See Hecht, R., ‘Great Britain and the Stimson Note of January 7, 1932’ in Pacific Historical Review (May 1969).Google Scholar
9 Manchester Guardian, 13 Feb. 1932.Google Scholar
10 The Times, 29 Feb. 1932.Google Scholar
11 Manchester Guardian, 8 Mar. 1932.Google Scholar
12 Hansard, , Parliamentary Debates, House of Lords, LXXXVII, 875Google Scholar (11 May 1933). In the League Year Book, 1933 (London, 1933), Cecil described the behaviour of certain great powers over the Far East as ‘poltroonery or worse’.Google Scholar
13 Respectively Spanish and Norwegian representatives on the League Council, and a member of the French delegation to the League. The substance of this report will be examined below.
14 Cecil, , A Great Experiment, pp. 225–6. Cf. below, p. 815, note 66.Google Scholar
15 Ibid. pp. 227 and 232.
16 Ibid. p. 228.
17 Ibid. p. 231.
18 Ibid. p. 332. The ‘reason given’, Cecil suggests, is that British interests were not at stake.
19 Democracy and Foreign Policy (Longmans, 1952). This book deals more satisfactorily with the press and Parliament than with public opinion as a whole.Google Scholar
20 Ibid. p. 624.
21 Ibid. pp. 20–8. The Manchester Guardian was particularly (and excessively) critical of the moderation of the League of Nations Union in this period. See, for example, the editorial of 8 December.
22 Ibid. pp. 43–57.
23 E.g. ibid. p. 198.
21 Ibid. pp. 624–5. It is worth noting that Austen Chamberlain – who found the LNU Executive Committee contained ‘some of the worst cranks I have ever known’, and who thought Cecil's methods ‘nearly always wrong and his judgement wholly unreliable’ – was privately extremely critical of Simon's handling of British policy. Though he supported Simon over the Far East in the House of Commons in March 1932, he was writing in September that he doubted whether the latter ‘has any policy beyond drifting’, and found the British delegation at Geneva in October ‘ill at ease and floundering, lacking any sure aim or certain guidance’. (Austen Chamberlain Papers, Birmingham University: references respectively: A.C. 40/5–9, letter to Lord Tyrrell of 13 Feb. 1933; A.C. 6/1/902–1062, letter to Lady Chamberlain of 22 Mar. 1933; A.C. 6/1/774–901, letter to Lady Chamberlain of 16 Sept. 1932; ibid. to Lady Chamberlain, 5 Oct. 1932.)
25 Bassett, , op. cit. p. 287.Google Scholar
26 Ibid. pp. 5–6.
27 Cecil, , A Great Experiment, e.g. pp. 230 and 234.Google Scholar
28 Cecil Papers, Add. 51112. Drummond nevertheless worked at Geneva in a direction which accorded with that of British policy.
29 The 20 Years’ Crisis (Macmillan, 1962 ed.), pp. 36–7.Google Scholar
30 A Great Experiment, pp. 232–3; this was written before Pearl Harbour.Google Scholar
31 The British determination not to fight over Shanghai – and her inability to do so in any case – is fully recorded in the Foreign Office, Cabinet and Cabinet Committee papers in the Public Record Office. As example, see the discussion of the Far Eastern Committee of the Cabinet on 15 Feb. 1932 (CAB 27/482); the Report of a Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence on Economic Sanctions Against Japan, 2 Mar. 1932 (CAB 24/228, CP 92 (32) ); and the Annual Review, for 1932, by the Chief of Staff Sub-Committee of the CID, with a Report on the Far Eastern Situation (CAB 24/229, CP 104 (32) ). Simon received advice from British observers in Shanghai and passed it on to the Cabinet to the following effect: that, despite the culpable nature of the Japanese action, once the fighting had started, ‘from the point of view of the security of the Settlement it appeared better that the Japanese should succeed than the Chinese’. (Cabinet of 17 Feb., CAB 23/70.) For the severe limitations on what the U.S. Government could contemplate doing, see, for example, Stimson's cable to Hugh Wilson, 26 Feb. 1932 (Foreign Relations of the United States, 1932, III (Washington, 1948), 452–3).Google Scholar Hoover's views will be found in a contemporary memorandum printed in Wilbur, R. L. and Hyde, A. M., The Hoover Policies (Scribeners, 1937), pp. 600–1.Google Scholar In his Memoirs (Hollis and Carter, 1952), Hoover relies a great deal on Cecil's book in suggesting that it was the European powers who made sanctions impossible. This gloss on his own role at the time is put in perspective by Professor Rappaport's comment (Henry L. Stimson and Japan, 1931–1933 (Chicago University Press, 1963), p. 121) that ‘Tokyo had only to look across the Pacific to realize that any bellicosity displayed by the Secretary of State was a mere façade’.Google Scholar
32 For an example of the indifference of the Kwantung Army towards League views on Manchuria, see the Chief of Staff's message to the Vice Minister of War, 4 June 1932 (International Military Tribunal of the Far East, Document no. 613, Exhibit 227); see also Kennedy, M. D., The Estrangement of Great Britain and Japan (Manchester University Press, 1969), p. 194.Google Scholar
33 A Great Experiment, p. 332.Google Scholar
34 Ibid. p. 225. It is interesting to read Cecil's view in 1941 of the need to clarify Article XVI for the future: ‘the action is to be preventive rather than penal, and is only obligatory if it is reasonably likely to be successful’ (ibid. p. 351). By 1946, Salvador de Madariaga was also stressing the unsatisfactory nature of sanctions as a means of international coercion: ‘Sanctions are based on the false analogy between inter-individual and international relations. A man is attacked in the street. A policeman and half a dozen zealous citizens rush to defend him, collar the bully and land him in gaol. Can this scene be transferred to international life? Evidently not. Nations … are determined by the natural laws of their place to do certain things and avoid others … (And) sanctions – even so-called economic sanctions – hurt the punishing nation as much as – at times even more than – the punished’ (Victors, Beware (Jonathan Cape, 1946), pp. 129–30). In 1931–3, these were the arguments of the British Foreign Office, rather than of Señor Madariaga and his colleagues at Geneva. Gilbert Murray also came to see an economic boycott as an unsatisfactory instrument. (Script of a Home Service talk of 26 July 1955, in the Gilbert Murray Papers.) Sir Arthur Salter, too, who in 1932 urged Simon to take action against Japan, a country ‘happily more susceptible than almost any other to the threat of isolation and severance of economic relations’ (letter of 2 Feb. 1932; P.R.O., F.O. 371, F590/1/10) was to observe in 1936: ‘From the start (of the League) we should have faced die fact that it is no use whatever to think of imposing any kind of sanctions against an aggressor unless you are prepared, if necessary, to support that pressure by the use of armed forces.’ Royal Institute of International Affairs, The Future of the League of Nations (New York, 1936), pp. 65–6.Google Scholar
35 Journal de Genève, 19 Feb. 1932.Google ScholarCf. Zimmern, A., The League of Nations and the Rule of Law (Macmillan, 1939), p. 428:Google Scholar ‘The first week was undoubtedly the crucial period, and the Council meeting of September 25, in which Great Britain, represented by Lord Cecil, retreated from the Greco-Bulgarian precedent of the previous week, was the crucial moment.’
36 Although the Manchester Guardian's own initial caution is often overlooked. See, for example, its editorial of 30 Sept. 1931: ‘The League … has to face this danger under very great disadvantages, due not only to distance but to uncertainty as to whether the soldiers or politicians really rule Japan. It must act if peace is to be preserved, but it must act widi circumspection.’ And on 26 Oct.: ‘The League has done all it can for the moment.’ Cf. the comment in the study by the Geneva Research Information Committee, The League and Manchuria (Geneva Special Studies, vol. II, no. 10, 1931) on the situation on 22 Sept.: ‘Speculation was rife, running from the "strong action" which many people, unthoughtful of the consequences, urged, to complete inaction …’ (emphasis added).
37 Cecil Papers, Add. 51100, letters to H. St George Saunders.
38 ‘London’ is used in the sense of ‘predominant opinion in the Government and Foreign Office’. Though there were some differences between the two, they may be taken as one so far as Cecil was concerned.
39 See, for example, a letter to Philip Noel-Baker, 7 Oct. 1932 (Cecil Papers, Add. 51107). There is a delightful letter in the Gilbert Murray papers (dated 1 Dec. 1931) in which Lady Cecil describes to Lady Mary Murray her inability to keep her temper with people of ‘our class – I mean people who dine late and all that – and are supposed to be educated (and) seem so often to go wrong about things that matter’. Such people tended to regard Cecil as a crank. On Cecil's previous relationship with Arthur Henderson and MacDonald, see Carlton, D., MacDonald versus Henderson (Macmillan, 1970), chs. 1 and 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
40 F.O. 800/285 (Simon's private papers).
41 F.O. 800/286.
42 Letter of 21 July 1932, Cecil Papers, Add. 51107.
43 A Great Experiment, p. 234.Google Scholar
44 See, for example, Cecil's clash with the Admiralty over the Draft Model Treaty at a conference between the Foreign Office, Cecil, and the Chiefs of Staff, 24 July 1930 (CAB 21/348). Some of Cecil's remarks on that occasion are relevant to the Manchurian situation. ‘In practice’, he assured a disbelieving First Sea Lord, ‘he consideied that all nations would be bound to respect and obey the direction of the League, but smaller nations might not have their sense of duty so highly developed.’ Later, however, he asserted that ‘supposing a big country had definitely made up its mind to risk a war and had invaded another country, he did not think that it would in the least mind violating a further covenant’. In response to Mr Alexander's warning that, given additional powers, the League might wish to stop Britain sending the fleet to Singapore in an emergency, Cecil, according to the minutes, ‘agreed, but added that unless we agreed, we would not be bound to accept the League recommendation. We might have excellent reasons for saying that this movement must be carried out, for reasons of national security.’ The Japanese were to justify their shipment of additional troops to Manchuria in similar terms.
45 F.O. 800/287, letter of 23 Dec. 1932.
46 F.O. 371, F5949/1391/10, minutes to no. 664 of Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939 (hereinafter cited as D.B.F.P.), second series, vol. VIII. For a more detailed analysis of British policy in this period, see Thome, Christopher, ‘The Shanghai Crisis of 1932', in American Historical Review (Oct. 1970).Google Scholar
47 F.O. 371, F7596/1391/10.
48 CAB 23/69.
49 F.O. 371, F7596/1391/10.
50 From the outset, the views of Cadogan (Adviser on League of Nations Affairs) were closer to those of Cecil than to many of his superiors in the Foreign Office. See his dissenting minute among those commenting on the Council proceedings of 22 Sept. F.O. 371, F5217/1391/10.
51 Deputy Under-Secretary of State.
52 F.O. 371, F6756/1391/10; minutes on D.B.F.P. no. 754.
53 F.O. 371, F6979/1391/10 (minutes on D.B.F.P. no. 787; cf. no. 831). Wellesley was to write a memorandum on the Far Eastern Problem (6 Feb. 1932; D.B.F.P. second series, vol. IX, no. 356) which Vansittart minuted as ‘a powerful and reasoned statement, at least to a large extent, of a case for Japan’ (F.O. 371, F1033/1/10).
54 D.B.F.P. vol. VIII, no. 787. In December Cecil described Lindley's attitude as having been ‘quite inadequate right through this dispute’ (ibid. vol. IX, no. 17, note).
55 Ibid. vol. IX, nos. 321 and 347.
56 Cecil Papers, Add. 51082, letter of 28 Nov. 1931. Despite his clashes with Cecil, Wellesley hoped and believed that ‘the forces of internationalism [would] in the long run triumph over those of nationalism’. Memorandum of 1 Dec. 1930, ‘A proposal for the establishment of a Politico- Economic Intelligence Department in the Foreign Office’; Ramsay MacDonald Papers, RM 1/39.
57 e.g. in a letter to Simon on 1 Feb. 1932, F.O. 800/286.
58 A Great Experiment, pp. 92–3. Cf. Carr, op. cit. ch. 3.Google Scholar
59 e.g. D.B.F.P. vol. IX, no. 10.
60 Ibid. no. 34.
61 Ibid. no. 40 (letter of 31 Dec. 1931). For the gulf between this image and reality, see for example, Ogata, op. cit.
62 See the correspondence between Simon and Cecil from November to January, in F.O. 800/285 and 286.
63 Cmd. 3757.
64 Cecil Papers, Add. 51081, letter of 21 Jan. 1932.
65 Gilbert Murray Papers, letter of 5 Jan. 1933.
66 With Reading, too, Cecil's working relations appear to have been good, despite his later assertion that the former thought it ‘of relatively small moment what happened in Manchuria’. Cf. a Foreign Office Minute by Reading of 28 Oct. (in D.B.F.P. vol. VIII, no. 662): ‘My impression is that if U.S. would now take matters up where the L. of N. has left it there would be better hope of Japan moving in the right direction … We should get into communication forthwith with U.S.’, F.O. 371, F5950/1391/10; and Reading's letter to Vansittart on 21 Oct.: ‘A failure by the League to find some way round the difficulty would be nothing short of a calamity …’, F.O. 800/226 – Reading's private papers.
67 Cecil Papers, Add. 51081, letter of 24 Dec. 1931.
68 F.O. 800/286.
69 F.O. 800/287, letter of 30 Dec. 1932.
70 Gilbert Murray Papers.
71 Gilbert Murray Papers, letter of 28 Nov. 1931. The article referred to concerned the decision (on which Murray had sought the advice of the two men in Geneva) not to hold a special meeting of the LNU on the Far East at that juncture.
72 Cecil Papers, Add. 51132, letter of 24 Dec. 1931. In this case Cecil may have been referring especially to Martin's suggestion of a secret bargain with Japan, rather than to his own position.
73 Ibid. Add. 51100, letter to H. St George Saunders. Emphasis added. The Council met in Paris, rather than in Geneva, between 16 Nov. and 10 Dec. 1931.
74 Manchester Guardian, 12 Dec. 1931.Google Scholar
75 P. 228.
76 On 10 September, Cecil told the Assembly that ‘there had scarcely ever been a period in the world's history when war seemed less likely’, and that Franco-German tension accounted for ‘seventy-five per cent of the political unrest in the world’. League of Nations Official Journal, Special Supplement No. 93 (Geneva, 1931), pp. 59–60.Google Scholar
77 Cecil Papers, Add. 51107, letter of 25 Sept. 1931. Cf. the recollection of Hugh Wilson (U.S. Minister in Switzerland): ‘There was no one member of the Council who was aware of the special rights of Japan in Manchuria …’, Diplomat Between Wars (Longmans, N.Y., 1941), p. 261.Google Scholar At the Council meeting of 22 September, Cecil recalled the occasion of the Greco-Bulgarian dispute as a model for League action (see Barros, J., The League of Nations and the Great Powers (Clarendon Press, 1970) ).Google Scholar On 25 September, he agreed with the Japanese representative that ‘primarily, the question of the dispute was a matter for the parties and not for the Council to deal with, unless it came before the latter under Article 15 …’, the Council's task being only ‘to safeguard the peace of nations’. By 23 October, however, he was stressing that ‘the most essential thing is to try to find a fundamental cure for what is now amiss’. League of Nations Official Journal (Dec. 1931), pp. 2270, 2284, 2348. The writer has not found evidence of any instructions from London which would account for Cecil's change of emphasis on 25 September. Although subsequent Foreign Office minutes rejected the Greco-Bulgarian parallel (F.O. 371, F5217/1391/10), the Cabinet on 22 September had approved what was already Cecil's intention: an attempt to secure a withdrawal of troops behind a certain line. CAB 23/68. Cecil appears to have overlooked his use of the GrecoBulgarian model – that case had been dealt with under Article II – when later declaring that all would have been well had China and the League proceeded under Article 15.
The impatient observations of the Manchester Guardian on 10 October make ironic reading in the light of later recriminations: ‘It is satisfactory to know that on this occasion (i.e. the Council meeting of 13 October 1931) Lord Reading will represent Great Britain, as Lord Cecil's diplomacy at the last meetings was so extraordinarily diplomatic that he appeared in one speech to be undoing what he had achieved in another.’
78 D.B.F.P. vol. VIII, no. 664.
79 Cecil later wrote (op. cit. p. 227) that at Paris Simon ‘was not prepared … even to urge that a diplomatic protest should be made by withdrawing the envoys of the League Powers from Tokyo’ (emphasis added).
80 League of Nations Official Journal (Deç. 1931), p. 2360.Google Scholar
81 D.B.F.P. vol. VIII, no. 730. China had brought the crisis before the League under Article II; she was to invoke Articles 10 and 15 on 29 January 1932.
82 Ibid. no. 754, footnote.
83 Ibid. no. 831.
84 Ibid. no. 739 (memorandum for Sir John Simon, 16 Nov.). After such an analysis, together with the letters cited below, there is a hint that the writer is covering himself in the parenthesis which occurs later in this memorandum: ‘If anything in the nature of coercion is ruled out – as I gather it is …’ On 13 January 1932, Cecil was to write to Austen Chamberlain that he had ‘for a long time believed that economic blockade was impracticable except as a part of belligerent action’. Cecil Papers, Add. 51079.
85 Gilbert Murray Papers. Cf. the emphasis in A Great Experiment (p. 332): ‘Not only was force not used to restrain the aggressor …’
86 Gilbert Murray Papers, letter of 21 Nov. 1931.
87 Ibid. letter of 28 Nov. Philip Noel-Baker was similarly optimistic about the consequences of an enquiry. ‘I am … sure that once the Commission was appointed and despatched things would enormously improve. The Japanese would never dare to continue fighting and they would never dare to resist the operations of the Commission on the spot.’ The two great weapons of the League were not being used: ‘public discussion and the supply of impartial information’ (letter to Murray of 7 Dec. 1931, Murray Papers).
88 D.B.F.P. vol. VIII, nos. 745, 789 and 795.
89 Ibid. no. 795 (letter to Simon, 27 Nov.).
90 P. 231.
91 Gilbert Murray Papers. The British expeditionary force referred to (at one time it numbered 20,000 men) had been sent to Shanghai in 1927 during a period of acute disturbances in China. It is important to recall that the Covenant (unlike the Pact of Paris) did not prohibit the use of force, being concerned only with ‘resort to war’. As in the Corfu incident, war was not declared between China and Japan in 1931–3, and diplomatic relations were not severed.
92 Gilbert Murray Papers, letter of 28 Nov. 1931.
93 Briefly, a League Resolution of 30 Sept. had called for a halt to the fighting and a Japanese withdrawal as soon as was practicable; on 24 Oct. the Council had called upon Japan to withdraw by 16 Nov., and although Japan's sole dissenting vote rendered this Resolution inoperative, there was evident humiliation when she did not comply. The 10 Dec. Resolution reaffirmed that of 30 Sept., called upon both sides not to aggravate the situation and set up (thanks to Japan's change of mind) a Commission of Enquiry. Japan ominously reserved the right to take ‘police’ action against bandits meanwhile.
94 D.B.F.P. vol. VIII, no. 831.
95 Ibid. vol. IX, no. 10 (emphasis added).
96 Ibid. no. 40.
97 Hansard, , Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, CXVIII, 990–2 (21 07 1919).Google Scholar
98 Cecil Papers, Add. 51083, memorandum on League policy, 26 May 1936, sent to Eden. For an illustration of the inner struggles experienced by pacific or pacifist supporters of the League as the likelihood of having to use force was borne in upon them, see Martin, Kingsley, Editor (Penguin, 1969).Google ScholarPubMed
99 D.B.F.P. vol. IX, no. 74.
100 Ibid. nos. 204 and 267.
101 CAB 23/70, Cabinet meeting of 10 Feb. 1932. Thomas, armed with the weight of Dominion opinion and his Trade Union experience of the superiority of conciliation over sanctions, was a leading proponent in Cabinet of the view that Article 16 should be abolished altogether.
102 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1932, III, 85–6 and 94–5.Google Scholar
103 D.B.F.P. IX, no. 267.
104 F.O. 800/286, letter to Simon, 26 Feb. 1932. President Hoover ruled out any question of the United States joining in sanctions, other than that of non-recognition. See Current, Richard, ‘The Stimson Doctrine and the Hoover Doctrine’, in American Historical Review, no. 59 (1953–1954).Google Scholar
105 F.O. 800/285, letter to Simon, 27 Nov. 1931.
108 Cecil Papers, Add. 51079, letter to Austen Chamberlain, 13 Jan. 1932.
107 Gilbert Murray Papers, letter of 25 Feb. 1932, containing a draft reply to a telegram Murray had received from a League supporter in the U.S.A., suggesting that London was obstructing Washington's desire to follow the League in imposing sanctions. The sender of the telegram had surrendered to wishful thinking following an interview with the Secretary of State, Stimson. Stimson Diary (Yale), 18 Feb. 1932, and Newton D. Baker Papers (Library of Congress), boxes 147 and 149.
108 Cecil papers, Add. 51107, letter to Philip Noel-Baker, 7 Mar. 1932. And yet in his letter of n Apr. to St George Saunders, cited earlier, Cecil concluded: ‘That does not mean that in the last stage it may not have been more desirable to proceed by way of an unofficial boycott.’
109 Ibid. letter to Philip Noel-Baker, 29 Apr. 1932.
110 Ibid. letters to Philip Noel-Baker, 22 Mar. and 29 Apr. 1932.
111 Cf. the examples given by Deutsch, Karl and Merritt, Richard, ‘Effects of events on National and International Images’, in Kelman, H. (ed.), International Behavior (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), p. 145:Google Scholar ‘If messages or memories about past events do not directly reinforce a strongly held image, they may be selectively screened or distorted until they do so.’
112 See, for example, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1931, III, 57.Google Scholar
113 Cf. The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, 1920–1933 (Hollis and Carter, 1952), pp. 366–70;Google ScholarMorison, E. E., Turmoil and Tradition (Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 383.Google Scholar
114 Lippmann, W., Interpretations, 1931–1933 (Allen and Unwin, 1933), pp. 207–9.Google Scholar
115 Interpretations, 1933–1935 (Macmillan, New York, 1936), p. 339;Google Scholar emphasis added. Lippmann's 1931 analysis that ‘the Powers are not in a position to do more … The Manchurian issue is beyond the resources of our civilisation’ had been amended thirteen years later to the assertion: ‘What we might have done, what the League might have done, if China had been able and willing to fight, no one can say. The fact is that China did not resist, and thu is a significant and conclusive reason, far more significant than any other reason, why Japan was not stopped’ (Interpretations, 1931–1933, pp. 189–90,Google Scholar and U.S. War Aims (Hamish Hamilton, 1944), p. 9).Google Scholar
116 See Graebner, N., The New Isolationism (The Ronald Press, N.Y., 1956).Google Scholar Cf. SirPratt, John, War and Politics in China (Jonathan Cape, 1943), p. 223.Google Scholar
117 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (Everyman, ed., 1924), p. 87.Google Scholar
118 See Claude, Inis, Swords Into Ploughshares (Random House, N.Y., 1959), ch. 12. The underlying paradox has often been pointed out: that to achieve genuine collective security would require a degree of disinterested commitment among men and states that, if it were achieved, would render the machinery of such security unnecessary.Google Scholar
119 The basis for this reaction has been well summarized by Professor F. S. Northedge in a paper on ‘British Opinion, the League and the U.N.’, which he wrote for a Chatham House study-group in 1953: ‘The liberal creed, and in relation to international affairs, its League of Nations idealism, were effective in unleashing two of the most powerful of human dispositions, the impulse towards 3 better human society, and the capacity for indignation and resentment when this impulse is frustrated’ (p. 37). I am grateful to Professor Northedge for lending me his copy of this paper. Cf. the comments of Harold Nicolson in the Chatham House discussions, The Future of the League of Nations, p. 159.Google Scholar
120 See Ike, Nobutaka (ed.), Japan's Decision for War (Stanford University Press, 1967).Google ScholarCf. Scalapino, R. A., Democracy and the Party Movement in Prewar Japan (University of California Press, 1962), p. 346:Google Scholar ‘The history of Japan after 1931 represented the logical culmination of previous trends … It did not require a fundamental revolution to push the democratic movement aside in Japan, and, indeed, no such event occurred.’ For examples of some inter-national or intertribal consequences of contrasting value-systems, see Kelman, , op. cit., particularly the chapter by R. A. Levine on ‘Socialization, Social Structure, and Intersocial Images’.Google Scholar
121 CAB 24/228, Report by a Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence on Economic Sanctions Against Japan, 2 Mar. 1932. Cf. the Chiefs of Staff Review for 1932: ‘The position is about as bad as it could be … The whole of territory in the Far East, as well as the coastline of India and our vast trade and shipping, lies open to attack.’ CAB 24/229.
122 This was also the opinion of Hugh Wilson (op. cit. p. 334): ‘I think … we would have recoiled even farther from the obligations of the Covenant, just as Great Britain recoiled from a literal interpretation of Article X …’
123 For a further discussion of the limitations involved, as demonstrated on an earlier occasion, see Barros, J., The Corfu Incident of 1923 (Princeton University Press, 1965), especially p. 301 ff.Google Scholar
124 Woolf, Leonard, The Journey Not the Arrival Matters (Hogarth Press, 1969), pp. 168–72.Google Scholarde Madariaga, Salvador, ‘Gilbert Murray and the League’, in Murray, Gilbert, An Unfinished Autobiography (London, 1960), which provides a brief but brilliant study of Cecil as well as of Murray.Google Scholar
125 CAB 24/225, C.P.317(31).