204 J.-A. PEMBERTON
feeling was that the world was ‘inevitably moving towards war.’^410 As a
way of coming to grips with this seemingly perplexing situation, Dulles
stated in the article, people had postulated ‘a personal devil,’ that is, they
had pointed a finger accusingly at Hitler, Mussolini and Japanese milita-
rists. In doing so, he added, they had overlooked the fact that ‘isolated
individuals could never prevail against world sentiment for peace, except
as they are the instrumentalities of powerful underlying forces.’^411
Foreshadowing the key message of his closing speech at the 1937
session of the ISC, Dulles claimed in his Atlantic Monthly article that
the real explanation for the march towards war concerned the fact that
the current world system was designed to prevent change. Explaining
his point, he observed that ‘forces which are in the long run irresisti-
ble are temporarily dammed up’ and warned that when these forces
‘finally break through,’ they will ‘do so with violence.’^412 Dulles main-
tained no-one would challenge the general proposition that the world
will and should continue to change: no-one would imagine that ‘the
world is immutably frozen in its present national lines’ or deny the need
for flexibility in some areas given the constant changes in the size and
character of the populations of nations.^413 Dulles insisted that in talking
of change he was not necessarily thinking of changes in national bound-
aries. Indeed, he stated that what he had most in mind was the com-
plex of treaties and rules which served to define and confine the activities
of nations. Dulles then offered the view that unless people allowed for
‘elasticity’ in the field of treaty law and in regard to the norms of inter-
national conduct, the possibility of ‘healthy life and growth’ will be
denied.^414
Dulles went on to note that at the end of the war, France had sought
a superstate equipped with an international police force with a view to
preventing changes that ‘might deprive her of the fruits of victory.’ He
added that having failed to achieve this goal, France had supported the
creation of the LON with its implied guarantee of the perpetuation of
(^411) Ibid.
(^412) Ibid.
(^413) Ibid.
(^414) Ibid., 492–93.
(^410) John Foster Dulles, ‘The Road to Peace,’ Atlantic Monthly (October 1935): 492–99,
492.