1 PEACEFUL CHANGE OR WAR? 11pointed out in his Chatham House address of December 17, 1935,
that at its General Conference on the Study of ‘Collective Security’ in
London in June, the ISC had decided that its next two-year study cycle
would be devoted to the topic of peaceful change and that prepara-
tory work in this regard was currently underway.^33 Toynbee might use-
fully have added that the proposal that the ISC should study the topic
of peaceful change for the duration of its 1935 to 1937 study cycle had
been brought to the conference by the American unit of the ISC, that
is, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He might also have use-
fully added that the American proposal had been supported by Charles
K. Webster in his role as representative of the British unit of the ISC,
namely, the British Coordinating Committee for International Studies
(BCCIS) and in his capacity as a member of the conference’s pro-
gramme committee. Webster was at that time the Stevenson Professor
in International History at the University of London. In 1919 he had
served as secretary of the military section of the British delegation to
the Paris Peace Conference. In the years 1922 and 1923, he occupied
the role of Wilson Professor of International Politics at the University of
Wales Aberystwyth. Webster was Toynbee’s old friend. In the context of
the ISC’s programme committee, it was Webster and Philip C. Jessup,
the latter being an American international legal scholar based at the
University of Columbia and a representative of the CFR at the confer-
ence, who were chiefly responsible for the selection of the topic of peace-
ful change and for the preparation of a formula defining the scope of the
study of it.^34
It should be noted that in a weighty memorandum published by the
CFR for the benefit of the ISC’s 1935 session and which had been dis-
tributed in advance of it, Jessup had beseeched the states of Europe to
adopt a policy of peaceful change and had cautioned against inflated
expectations of what the United States was prepared to do in respect to
(^33) Ibid., 26–27.
(^34) Fergus Chalmers Wright, ed., Population and Peace: A Survey on International
Opinion on Claims for Relief from Population Pressure (Paris: International Institute of
Intellectual Cooperation, 1939), 20n., 330. For Toynbee’s relationship with Charles K.
Webster, see Arnold J. Toynbee, Acquaintances (London: Oxford University Press, 1967),
276.