56 J.-A. PEMBERTON
imperial trusteeship had first been elaborated, namely, by Vittoria and
Dominique Solo.^176
Zimmern was similarly appalled by the idea that African colonies or
mandates should be transferred to so-called unsatisfied countries. He
observed in regard to this that it appeared that a ‘sense of equal relation-
ship between the white and the non-white peoples,’ the development of
which he described as the ‘last great task of the movement for freedom,’
was now rejected by a ‘large part of European public opinion’. Its rejec-
tion, Zimmern insisted, was a further sign that Europe was no longer a
civilised continent and had morally regressed. More specifically, Zimmern
was dismayed because as a liberal imperialist he upheld the principle of
trusteeship. He declared in a lecture delivered in August 1935 at the
annual session of the Geneva Institute of International Relations that to
treat Africans as mere things to be bartered, as Webster also suggested,
rather than as ‘human beings of the same species as ourselves’ in order
to save white skins would be an unforgivable breach of this principle.^177
Giving vent to his indignation, Zimmern stated the following:
Not only are ‘colonial wars’ spoken of quite naturally as a sort of up-to-date
form of hunting, but there is talk in many quarters of handing over non-
white populations as a sort of compensation or Dane-geld to unsatisfied rul-
ers and peoples. To the so-called Liberals who sponsor methods of this kind
the reminder is due that they should pay the price demanded of them in their
own substance and not in that of others. Let them hand over, for instance,
the South Wales coalfield with its inhabitants thrown in, or at the very least
the British Government holdings in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, rather
than interfere with the work of British administrators who are devoting their
lives to single-minded services on behalf of the African peoples.^178(^176) Ibid., 6–7. See also Intellectual Coopération (a), nos. 68–69 (1936), 8. The Japanese
participants in the Madrid conference were Tachi Sakutarō, a professor of law at the
Imperial University of Tokyo who defended the Japanese policy in north China; Kōtarō
Tanaka, dean of the Faculty of Law at of the Imperial University of Tokyo; and Sato Junzo,
the former secretary of the Japanese National Committee of Intellectual Cooperation and
Japanese delegate to the International Conference of Museums and to the Congress of
Libraries.
(^177) Alfred E. Zimmern, ‘Liberty, Democracy, and the Movement Towards World Order,’
in Problems of Peace, Tenth Series: Anarchy or World Order (London: George Allen and
Unwin, 1936), 149–50.
(^178) Ibid. See also Sir Alfred Zimmern, Spiritual Values and World Affairs (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1939), 174–6.