40 J.-A. PEMBERTON
consensus in Britain: that an understanding with Germany was desirable
even if that involved conceding to some of its demands for changes on
the economic front or in the administration of colonies or mandates.^130
Buoyed by his visit to Germany, Toynbee was optimistic for a time that
a revision of the Treaty of Versailles might soon eventuate. On March 20,
he wrote to Albert Dufour-Feronce, a former member of the German
Foreign Office who had served between 1928 and 1932 as one of three
under-secretaries general at the LON and who had been retired from dip-
lomatic service in 1933 following a brief period as Germany’s ambassador
at Belgrade. In his letter, Toynbee told Dufour-Feronce the following:
‘I hope and believe that the result may be something in the nature of a
new peace conference...at which a negotiated settlement will be substi-
tuted for a dictated one.’^131
Toynbee was also doubtless buoyed by the thought that German par-
ticipation in the study meetings of the ISC on peaceful change which
were scheduled for May 1936 and mid-1937 was a distinct possibility.
As recorded by Leo Gross in a letter to Chalmers Wright on January
9, 1936, it was with a view to realising this possibility that Toynbee
laid plans to open conversations with German scholars during his visit
to Hamburg and Berlin in the following month.^132 On November 27,
1935, Bonnet sent a letter to Maurice Bourquin, professor of contem-
porary diplomatic history at the Graduate Institute of International
Studies in Geneva (Institut universitaire de hautes études internationales),
professor of international law at the Faculty of Law at the University of
Geneva and Belgian delegate to the Paris Peace Conference, to the LON
Assembly and to the Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of
Armaments. Bourquin had served as general rapporteur of the ISC’s
1934 and 1935 conferences on collective security and was its general rap-
porteur for its upcoming conferences on peaceful change. In that letter
Bonnet told Bourquin he was pleased to inform him that the Rockefeller
Foundation, which had in the past supported the work of the IIIC’s
International Relations and Social Sciences Service, a service which acted
as the ISC’s international secretariat, had ‘generously decided to accord
to the Institute a subvention which...[would]...permit it to give effect
(^130) Crozier, ‘Chatham House and Appeasement,’ 230–31.
(^131) Toynbee, 1936, quoted in McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 173.
(^132) Gross to Chalmers Wright, 9 January 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-15.b, UA.