1 PEACEFUL CHANGE OR WAR? 7On the evening of December 17, 1935, Toynbee presented a paper
at a general meeting at Chatham House in St. James’s Square, the home
of the RIIA. The paper was entitled ‘Peaceful Change or War?’. Early in
his address, Toynbee explained that he had written the paper less than
three weeks before the date on which it was delivered: before the public
revelation of what he referred to as the events of December 7 and 8. The
events in question concerned a supposed plan of conciliation between
Italy and Ethiopia devised by the French premier Pierre Laval. This plan
had been devised in view of the fact that the LON was shortly due to
make a final decision on a proposal to add an oil embargo to the range of
economic sanctions it had imposed on Italy under Article 16 of the cov-
enant in light of the council’s lack of success in effecting a settlement of
the dispute that Ethiopia had submitted to it.^25 At a meeting in Paris on
the evening of December 7, Laval had warned the British foreign secre-
tary Sir Samuel Hoare, that oil sanctions would spell war and that ‘if so,
he could not guarantee France keeping her word [to assist Great Britain
if Mussolini attacked it], unless terms were put to Mussolini with which
he might be expected to agree.’^26 Following Laval’s acceptance of cer-
tain adjustments to his plan in Ethiopia’s favour, the foreign secretary
in McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 169. On the potential alliance of have-not states, see
Arnold J. Toynbee, ‘Peaceful Change or War? The Next Stage in the International Crisis,’
International Affairs 15, no. 1 (1936): 26–56, 30–1. Toynbee stated the following in a
letter to the Times: ‘The Abyssinians to-day are dying painfully because they have the cour-
age to fight to the death against an aggressor who is overwhelmingly stronger than they
are, and who is using a devilish weapon which he has sworn to renounce. We Europeans
(as Mr. Baldwin told one European last Saturday) are perhaps going to die the same pain-
ful death to-morrow because some of us have not scrupled to commit a double breach of
faith and morality by making an aggressive war and waging it with poison gas, while the
rest of us have not dared to carry out more than a fragment of our covenant, for fear of
the immediate risks to which we might expose ourselves by keeping faith completely....
If we Europeans persist in our present course, we are going to turn our arms against one
another and then die in droves, like sheep penned in slaughter-houses, from the poison
which European airmen will spray her European cities. If our death is to be a premature
and painful one anyway, which matters more? To make sure of dying it to-morrow instead
of to-day? Or to make sure of dying it with honour instead of which dishonour?’ Arnold J.
Toynbee, letter to the editor, Times, April 22, 1936.
(^25) Toynbee, ‘Peaceful Change or War? The Next Stage in the International Crisis,’
26n, 28.
(^26) Keith Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain (London: Macmillan, 1946), 272–3.