2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 191directing his comments at Berber, Lytton observed the following of the
generation which experienced the catastrophe of 1914:
The generation which has had that experience is led now to desire peace
passionately, to seek peace by any possible avenue; but let there be no mis-
take; we have not grown soft in our pursuit of peace and though we can
never efface from our memories the experience we have been through, this
generation is still equally determined that it will never consent to buy its
immunity from a repetition of that experience by submission to force pre-
sented in any form.^367Lytton’s thesis was questioned at the conference by Wood who
had spent the past year in Europe on a fellowship from the American
Social Science Research Council and who produced Peaceful Change
and the Colonial Problem as a result. Wood suggested that it was ‘pre-
cisely’ because of the threat of war that ‘interest in peaceful change...
[had] become most acute’ and that conferences on the topic were
being held. He added that as it was ‘most necessary’ to avoid war, con-
sideration should be given to ‘making some sort of concessions.’^368 In
Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, Wood elaborated on the
point he made at the conference to the effect that it was only because
of the threat of war that a groundswell of interest in the topic of peace-
ful change had emerged. In his book he argued that under conditions in
which international relations are generally equable, one would not expect
the word change to be modified by the word peaceful as change under
such conditions is assumed to be peaceful: the expression peaceful change
is only likely to be used in a context in which one is faced with a choice
between violent or non-violent adjustments to the status quo.^369
A reason for resisting demands for the redistribution of colonies and
colonial retrocession that was discussed at length at the conference con-
cerned the principle of trusteeship. Henri Labouret, a professor at the
(^367) Ibid., 579–80.
(^368) Ibid., 455.
(^369) Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 18. In the preface to Peaceful
Change and the Colonial Problem, a book which was written after the outbreak of war in
Europe, Wood stated the following: ‘Should the Allies win, it is not inconceivable that, in a
peace conference with representatives of a non-Hitlerian Germany (assuming that they will
be allowed to attend), Germany might be readmitted to the burdens and privileges of trus-
teeship over African territory’ (ibid., 7).