1 PEACEFUL CHANGE OR WAR? 57According to Zimmern, territorial revision, whether in Africa or
Europe, was not a policy; it was not an alternative to sanctions. As he
had indicated at the 1935 ISC session in London, he saw proposals for
territorial revision as nothing but surrender to ‘blackmail,’ a point ech-
oed in the above passage as indicated by Zimmern’s employment of the
word danegeld.^179
A conference At yosemite
The question of peaceful change was also debated at the sixth confer-
ence of the IPR which was held between August 15 and 29, 1936, at
the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park. That the Yosemite con-
ference was to address the question of peaceful change was the official
pretext for Bonnet’s attendance as an observer on behalf the IIIC and
indeed, while at the conference, he would serve as one of four chairs pre-
siding over the conference’s discussion at its fifth and final round table
of the following topic: changing Balance of Political Forces in the Pacific
and Possibilities of Peaceful Adjustment.^180 It should be noted that
within a few years of its establishment in 1925, the IPR had developed
an impressive reputation as ‘a fully cooperative international organization
(^179) ‘Prevention of War: Discussion,’ in Bourquin, ed., Collective Security, 280.
(^180) For the name of the hotel at which conference participants were accommodated, see
Tomoko Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific: The United States Japan and the Institute
of Pacific Relations, 1919– 1945 (London: Routledge, 2002), 200. For Bonnet’s attend-
ance at the 1936 and role in the 1936 conference of the IPR, see William O. Scroggs to
Leo Gross, 10 September 1936. AG 1-IICI-K-I-18.d, UA, and ‘Appendix 1: Conference
Membership and Committees,’ in W.L. Holland and Kate L. Mitchell, eds., Problems of
the Pacific, 1936: Aims and Results of Social and Economic Policies in Pacific Countries,
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, Yosemite National
Park, California, 15 – 29 August 1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937), 440–
- William L. Holland and Kate L. Mitchell were assisted by Harriet Moore and Richard
Pyke in the production of this sixth record of the proceedings of the IPR. Moore was one
of three research associates and Pyke one of three research assistants at the International
Secretariat of the IPR. The conferences of the IPR were at first held on a biennial basis.
However, after 1933, they were held on a triennial basis. In this regard, the preface to
the proceedings of the Yosemite conference stated the following: ‘More than ever before,
the Yosemite Conference represented for most of its members not an isolated episode but
rather the extension and culmination of a long period of preliminary study and organized
discussion with other members of their own National Councils. In this the conference had