24 J.-A. PEMBERTON
to paying blackmail’; as Wedgewood would have it, it would amount to
buying the colonial have-nots off with Danegeld.^78 Further to this and
giving expression to a view that would be increasingly articulated as the
debate concerning colonial appeasement continued to unfold, the pam-
phlet advised that such a transfer would ‘perpetuate the notion that colo-
nial “swag” is a legitimate possession, only needing distribution among
the robbers. The ending of all imperial domination should be preferred
to a division of its “privileges and causes.”’^79
Anticipating one of the key objections as to why there was opposition
to yielding colonially to Germany, Toynbee insisted in his December 17
address that a policy would see the weak thrown to the ‘wolves’ in order
avoid war among the great powers should be rejected. Recent history
had shown the futility of such a policy: certain ‘violent changes at the
expense of the weak by collusion between the Great Powers’ had done
nothing to avert a general war among those powers in 1914. Toynbee
then put the question as why it was that a policy of ‘throwing the weak
to the wolves only whets the wolves appetite instead of taking the edge
off it?’ A key answer to this question according to Toynbee, was that
such a policy serves notice to the ‘have-not Powers’ that they have the
‘have Powers on the run’ and that knowing this the former will not ‘for-
bear to attack the haves’ no matter how much ‘plunder they [the have-
nots] have already taken from the weak.’ Adding flesh to this last point,
Toynbee observed that the ‘pickings’ of Ethiopia and even Manchuria
were ‘trifling’ in comparison with the ‘loot that there is to be won’ in the
French and British Empires.^80
(^78) Wood, Peaceful Change and the Colonial Problem, 99. Josiah Wedgewood stated in the
House of Commons the following: ‘There will always be a demand from Germany, from
Italy and from Poland for foreign money; and just as, when the Norse pirates came over to
England, we always bought them off with Danegeld year by year in order that they might
go away again, so these people who have no money say they are going to be nasty as long
as we do not pay them.’ 336 Parl. Deb., H. C. (5th series), 3 June 1938, 2489.
(^79) British Labour Party Advisory Committee, The Demand for Colonial Territories
and Equality of Economic Opportunity, 1936, quoted in Wood, Peaceful Change and the
Colonial Problem, 99. Wood pointed out that the pamphlet prepared by the advisory com-
mittee concerning the demand for colonial territories was prepared ‘at the request of the
National Executive Committee of the Labour Party, which, however, is not bound by all
the committee’s recommendations’ (ibid., 99n.).
(^80) Toynbee, ‘Peaceful Change or War? The Next Stage in the International Crisis,’ 31,
45–6.