1 PEACEFUL CHANGE OR WAR? 81in view of the obligations of the Pact of Paris and as endorsed in a note
issued by the LON Council on February 16 which associated the prin-
ciple with the covenant’s Article 10), Wright stated that should ‘a real
desire for independence develop in that state’ it might also participate.^246
It should be noted here that in the tradition of the Lytton Commission’s
report, which had been unequivocal on the point that the constitution
of the so-called state of Manchukuo was not the expression of a desire
for self-determination on the part of the local population as the Japanese
government had claimed, Wright elsewhere in his paper put the name
Manchukuo in quotation marks.^247
In regard to those controversies which concerned the Pacific,
Wright considered it ‘reasonable’ to include in a regional organisa-
tion the United States and the three British Dominions, namely, New
Zealand, Canada, and Australia, all of which had ‘homelands fronting the
Pacific.’^248 At this point, Wright reached the end of this list of prospec-
tive members: he suggested that it would be wrong to introduce into an
organisation centred on the Asia-Pacific, powers whose sole interests in
the region were colonial possessions and trade precisely because to do
so would be to transform a regional into a world organisation; it would
‘seem better,’ he concluded in this regard, ‘to handle the problems in
which such states are interested through the League of Nations.’^249
Wright contended that in terms of stabilising the Pacific area, the
LON had chalked up many successes over the years, its most recent suc-
cess in his view being the resolution in May 1932 of the Shanghai phase
of the Sino-Japanese dispute which followed the so-called Shanghai
Incident. As Wright noted, the LON Council responded to this inci-
dent, which occurred just after midnight on January 29, by immedi-
ately appointing the consuls of the powers in Shanghai to report on the
problem, adding that the success of the LON’s action in this case (which
was definitively ruled upon by the LON Assembly at an extraordinary
(^246) Ibid., and Stimson, The Far Eastern Crisis, 101–2. See also Text of the Note of Henry
L. Stimson, 1932, reproduced in Felix Morley, The Society of Nations: Its Organization and
Constitutional Development (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1932), 479, and
LON, OJ 13, no. 3 (1932), 383–4.
(^247) Wright, ‘The Working of Diplomatic Machinery in the Pacific,’ 418.
(^248) Ibid., 426.
(^249) Ibid.