236 J.-A. PEMBERTON
World War and ‘some of the deeper-lying ones longer still.’ Davis insisted
that in order to understand why the debate on peaceful change had
only recently arrived, one needed to recall certain of the events that had
occurred over the previous few years. He declared that it was his inten-
tion to recall those events and that he would do so ‘in a scientific spirit
so to state things that they be recognized as true whether one likes it or
not, to define facts, disregarding partisan preferences.’^532
Davis recalled that when the United States refused to ratify the peace
treaties and join the LON, Great Britain and France had been left in a
‘position to control the course of European events and to direct major
policy’. He stated that this was a situation that could only last as long
as these two powers concurred with each other on ‘main points in
practice and in principle’. Davis maintained that the situation in ques-
tion was upheld down to 1934 or 1935. In these years, ‘indications of a
deep divergency in the tendencies of...[British and French]... thought
began to multiply’. According to Davis, the culminating points of this
deep divergency were firstly, the Franco-Italian ‘tacit understanding
in regard to...interests in Africa, especially Ethiopia,’ and secondly, the
Anglo-German Naval Agreement that had given rise to so much ‘French
resentment.’ All the while these developments were unfolding, he noted,
German military and naval strength continued to augment such that
Germany was soon able to ‘have her own policy and pursue it.’ Davis
pointed out that the augmentation in German military and naval power
in conjunction with an accord later reached between Berlin and Rome,
had created such an uncertain outlook that London and Paris had ‘drawn
closer together again with a view to regaining a measure of the control
that had been let slip.’^533
Davis affirmed that the debate on peaceful change arose because of
the loss of Anglo-French control over events in Europe and the growing
perception in light of this loss of control that in order for there to be
‘any security in the sense of freedom from the menace of possible war,’
there must be an effort to ‘open prospects of reasonable satisfaction to
the claims of dissatisfied and insurgent nations’ in regard to questions of
‘power, prestige and prosperity.’ He claimed that the ‘clear conclusion’
reached by the 1935 session of the ISC in London was that the problem
(^532) Ibid., 147.
(^533) Ibid., 148–49.