Story of International Relations

1 PEACEFUL CHANGE OR WAR? 83

which had earlier been made by Felix Morley, an American who closely
followed the LON’s handling of the Sino-Japanese dispute begin-
ning with the Manchurian incident and down to the conclusion of the
Shanghai affair, and which some later felt was not wholly justified given
the circumstances), Wright stated the following:

Even if the U.S.S.R. had not co-operated, it seems probable that the

Japanese Invasion might have been stopped if the United States had imme-

diately stood behind the desire of the League Powers to follow their usual

tradition of dispatching a commission to the spot immediately, in order to

report on the validity of the Japanese claim that her initial action was jus-

tified by defensive necessity. Invasion cannot be stopped by moral opin-

ion unless that opinion becomes crystallized before the invasion has really

begun. It was impossible for this opinion to crystallise without an impartial

report from Manchuria....The United States apparently was persuaded by

the Japanese ambassador at Washington not to support the proposal pend-

ing in the League in the latter part of September 1931 for such a commis-

sion, with a result that the critical moment passed without action.^254

Wright noted that the Manchurian crisis had had a ‘disastrous’ impact
on ‘confidence in the effectiveness of general international organization in
the Far East’ and that since that time the LON had been subject to two
other devastating blows.^255 The first blow can in the form of Germany’s
remilitarisation of the Rhineland in violation of the Treaty of Versailles and
the Rhineland Pact of 1925, a development which effectively announced
the demise of the LON’s Locarno system, and the second in the form of
the failure to prevent the Italian conquest of Ethiopia. The latter was a
particularly bitter blow given that the Italian aggression had seen the
LON mobilise its collective security machinery for the first time, much to
the joy and amazement of many League partisans who had thought that
machinery had fallen into a permanent state of disuse. Furthering initial
hopes that the LON might succeed in checking the Italian aggression,

(^254) Wright, ‘The Working of Diplomatic Machinery in the Pacific,’ 427. See also Quincy
Wright, ‘An American View of Far Eastern Problems,’ International Affairs 14, no. 1
(1935): 69–88, 75; Morley, The Society of Nations, 480; and Reginald Bassett, Democracy
and Foreign Policy, a Case History: The Sino-Japanese Dispute, 1931 – 33 (London:
Longmans, Green and Co., 1952), 17–8, 92.
(^255) Wright, ‘The Working of Diplomatic Machinery in the Pacific,’ 427.