Story of International Relations

2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 163

by House to Wilson, Schacht stated that it would ‘impossible for the
American people to ignore the solemn declarations made by their Chief
Executive and his collaborator.’^265 The Americans, he declared, could
not close their eyes to the moral responsibility with which President
Wilson had saddled them as a result of the way in which Germany was
treated in 1919 in respect to its colonial possessions.^266 In order to
show that the Americans did indeed feel the weight of this responsibility,
Schacht quoted from an article penned by House, who had been a mem-
ber of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace and Wilson’s close
adviser at the Peace Conference, which had appeared in 1935 and which
was called ‘The need for an international New Deal.’ The quotation read
as follows:

Every statesmen will admit in private that Germany, Italy and Japan need

reservoirs into which to pour their man power and from which to draw

those necessities and raw materials that nature has denied them. But the

great possessing nations—Great Britain, France, the United States and

Russia—are unwilling to grant to their less fortunate fellows more than

the crumbs that fall from their colonial table. Just as social peace cannot

prevail without some adjustment of the capitalistic system, so international

peace cannot be preserved without drastic territorial adjustments. Great

Britain, France, Russia and the United States must receive Italy, Germany,

and Japan Germany on terms adjusted to present world conditions and

recognize their insistence upon being given their proper part of the colo-

nial resources of the world. Chaos and catastrophe will be upon us unless

those who have among the Powers are willing to share in some way with

those who have not.^267

House’s call for an international New Deal had already provided
useful ammunition for Japan it having been used by Prince Konoe in
November 1935 as a basis for arguing that Japan was ‘justified in seek-
ing, along with Italy and Germany, a redistribution of the world’s wealth’
and for ‘demanding new recognition for Japan’s power in Asia.’^268

(^265) Ibid., 225.
(^266) Ibid.
(^267) Edward M. House, 1935, quoted in Schacht, ‘Germany’s Colonial Demands,’ 233.
See also Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 214, 325.
(^268) William Miles Fletcher, The Search for New Order: Intellectuals and Fascism in Prewar
Japan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 95.