2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 165One might observe that the last sentence of the above statement was
somewhat evocative of the Japanese right to live doctrine, although per-
haps a more precise description of the doctrine which Schacht might be
said to have invoked in that sentence is that of the will to live and flour-
ish of great nations. Schacht’s statement in his article that no nation of
‘honor and worth’ would willingly submit to a policy aimed at depriving it
of the vital necessities of life and that, to the contrary, such a nation would
use everything in its power in order to defeat it, is consistent with such a
doctrine. According to Schacht, his point concerning a nation of honour
and worth was well demonstrated by the failure of the policy of sanctions
against Italy. Advancing an argument often put forward by apologists for
the unruly, Schacht declared in his article that a policy of sanctions was
contrary to the spirit of peace: ‘no friend of peace can ever approve of
measures intended to cut off great Powers from the natural treasures of
the earth’ as such measures drive ‘nations apart and into war’.^273
Schacht had long argued that Germany was over-populated.
Germany’s putative population problem was the point of departure for a
speech he gave on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the founda-
tion of the Berlin-Charlottenburg section of the German Colonial Society
in March 24, 1926, in which he outlined the ‘Neue koloniale Politik.’^274
However, in that speech and unlike other supporters of German colonial
expansion both past and present, Schacht did not dwell on emigration
(^273) Ibid., 230. According to Carl Walter Young, who, it should be noted, was one of the
Lytton Commission’s seven expert advisors, the Japanese right to live doctrine was devel-
oped by Japanese officials and publicists because the treaty rights that Japan enjoyed in
Manchuria were insufficient to ‘establish legal claims to a general superiority of economic
and political position.’ The crucial feature of the doctrine was the assertion that a nation
that is ‘manifestly poor in the gifts of nature, has a right, moral or legal, to require a com-
paratively richer but politically weaker state to provide for the uninterrupted flow of such
resources to the needy nation.’ Carl Walter Young, Japan’s Special Position in Manchuria
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1931), 298, 300. George H. Blakeslee gave as
another name for the right to live doctrine the ‘right to economic expansion’. He noted that
the right to live doctrine was ‘interwoven’ with the Japanese Monroe Doctrine. George H.
Blakeslee, ‘The Japanese Monroe Doctrine,’ Foreign Affairs 11, no. 4 (1933): 671–81, 275.
(^274) Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 15–16. See
also Chalmers Wright, Population and Peace, 339. Schacht’s speech of March 24, 1926,
was reported in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung on March 26 and 28, 1926. See also
Gilbert Maroger, L’Europe et la question coloniale: Revendications coloniales allemandes–
Aspirations coloniales polonaises (Paris: Sirey, 1938), 446. Note that the preface to L’Europe
et la question coloniale was written by Sébastien Charléty.