234 J.-A. PEMBERTON
Above all, however, Angell took aim at those who proposed the redress-
ing of grievances as an alternative to a policy of collective security. Angell
stated of the revisionist approach the following:
This is not realism; it is not equity. Remedy of grievances, ‘revision,’ is not
an alternative to the policy of collective security. The latter is the condi-
tion sine qua non of being able to carry any just revision into effect; of any
hope of change in the status quo except by war, which means change at
the dictation of the victor...To argue ‘there can be no security till we get
justice’ is to invert the truth, which is that we shall never get justice till we
have managed to organize our common defence on a mutual and collective
basis.^526Noting that elements in the press and elsewhere had denounced plans
for mutual assistance as ‘making trouble with Germany,’ Angell argued
that revision should not be considered until states such as France felt
secure. This meant that the states demanding revision must renounce vio-
lence and conquest and that machinery for ensuring that unruly states can
be brought under control must be created. Revision unaccompanied by
the creation of machinery for enforcing the law, Angell warned echoing
Zimmern, Webster and others, would not conduce to peace, but would
only encourage ‘more force, more ferocity, more cynicism and evil’.^527
Angell brought into full view the breakdown in the alliance between
peaceful change and collective security. This alliance was prone to rup-
ture from the moment when some began to treat peaceful change as a
complement of rather than a supplement to the system of collective secu-
rity. It did not take much of a leap from there to go on to present peace-
ful change as an alternative to collective defence in response to the threat
of change by violent means. Such an approach seemed to be encapsu-
lated by the title of Toynbee’s December 1935 lecture at Chatham
House: ‘Peaceful Change or War?’. That the mantra of peaceful change
drowned out the calls for collective security for a time is partly explained
by the overwhelming priority given to peace by many of the parti-
sans of peaceful change: the question of the means of achieving peace
became for many of these partisans a second-order consideration.^528
(^528) Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 18–9.
(^526) Angell, ‘Current Criticisms of the Peace Front,’ 201.
(^527) Ibid., 202, 205.