212 J.-A. PEMBERTON
1936, in particular, to the condition that Germany return to the League,
to the condition that there was a ‘mitigation of racial intolerance’ in
Germany and to the condition that there was ‘general disarmament.’
That said, it is very difficult to accept that the authors of this letter,
Murray especially, actually believed that the National Socialists would be
willing to meet any of these conditions.^443 In 1936, in a private com-
munication with William Percival Crozier, editor of the Manchester
Guardian, and against the background of the reoccupation of the
Rhineland, Murray made the following observations:
By the way, I am getting really alarmed at the flood of anti-French feeling
in the English papers. Hitler makes it quite clear in Mein Kampf, and has
since repeated it to Brüning, that his policy is ‘to bring France to her knees
by the help of Great Britain,’ and I think he has chosen a very ingenious
way of doing it. He breaks his treaty at a point vital to the French, where
we are legally but not morally emotionally bound. If we acquiesce here,
what shall we do when he makes aggressions in Czechoslovakia or Austria,
where we are bound by no special treaty? My own view is that we ought
simply to have replied to him that by violating the Treaty of Locarno,
Germany has forfeited the protection of the Treaty, whereas France and
Belgium retain it. Thus, the result of his action is not to divide us from
the French but to align us up with France and divide us from Germany. I
believe that would have been enough, and we could have done it without
any consultation.^444There is one other consideration that makes the letter penned by
Toynbee, Murray, Bartlett and Noel-Buxton on the colonial question
worthy of note: that the question that its authors addressed seem-
ingly in earnest, was no more than a conjurer’s trick. That the German
colonial demands were confected in order to achieve political ends
of a different kind was a view that many had arrived at by 1937. For
example, in January 1937, Marius Moutet, the French minister for the
colonies, observed that the German colonial claims appeared and disap-
peared ‘according to her needs in general and, above all, her European
(^444) Gilbert Murray, 1936, quoted in Madariaga, ‘Gilbert Murray and the League,’ 196.
(^443) Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 101.