72 J.-A. PEMBERTON
When demands for change are made against a background of threatening
behaviour, Angus observed, the spectre of collective security looms into
view. The question of collective security comes to the fore
when it seems necessary that ‘dissatisfied’ and rather impatient nations
should be convinced that some at least of the changes which they demand
can be secured without the use of force. To guarantee the status quo by
a system of collective security would preclude any changes except those
made by mutual consent way implies that some standard can be found by
which the moral right of a nation to insist on the observance of the full
legal rights can be limited. At this point, an awkward question must be
answered. ‘Is this new standard to be a purely moral standard, or it is to be a
political standard which, in some ingenious way, mixes justice and force?’....
[T]he research work of the Institute has been able to keep clear of this
troublesome question. It is concerned with establishing facts, not with
reaching agreement as to international standards of morality. But in pre-
senting the results of the research this warning must be given emphatically in
order not to turn aside attention from an issue which must be basic in any
thorough-going study of peaceful change.^221The discussion of peaceful change at Yosemite followed more or less
the same lines as did discussions of the topic elsewhere at the time. The
leader of the Australian group at Yosemite, namely, F. W. Eggleston, a
former attorney-general of Australia, told the conference that the ‘main
problem in the Pacific, as in other parts of the world, is change and the
adjustment to change’ and that ‘the difficulties of adjustment’ in this
regard were ‘almost insuperable’ because of the ‘rapid increase in the
tempo of change’ in the Pacific as elsewhere.^222 Eggleston observed that
the ‘doctrine collective security’ raised the question as to whether or to
what extent ‘the desire for security was compatible with the necessity
for change,’ suggesting in this regard that the balance between the two
imperatives was at that moment weighted too heavily in favour of the
desire for security.^223
(^221) Ibid., 10. Emphasis added.
(^222) Holland and Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 182.
(^223) An Australian member (F. W. Eggleston), 1936, quoted in Holland and Mitchell,
eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 182. For Eggleston’s various roles and the verifica-
tion of his identity as the Australian member in question, see ‘Appendix 1: Conference
Membership and Committees,’ and ‘Appendix 3: Conference Programme,’ in Holland and
Mitchell, eds., Problems of the Pacific, 1936, 435, 448.