3 CONFERENCES AT PRAGUE AND BERGEN AND THE LOOMING WAR 343‘Realist View of Law,’ he approvingly cited Berber’s Security and Justice
on two occasions.^366
Unlike Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis, Kohn applauded Zimmern’s
Spiritual Values and World Affairs, a book based on lectures Zimmern
had delivered at Oxford between January 24 and March 4, 1939, ‘before
the change in British public opinion and in Mr. Chamberlain’s mind.’^367
Therein Zimmern reflected on what he viewed as the ‘prevailing moral
and mental confusion’ which, according to Zimmern, had resulted in
the League’s effective collapse and in the policy of appeasement.^368 In
terms of the failure of the League, Zimmern attributed a great deal of
responsibility to those whom he characterised as ‘pseudo-Quakers’: paci-
fists who had posed as friends of the League but who were, according to
Zimmern, among its ‘most dangerous opponents’. Elaborating on this
point, Zimmern observed that whether ‘in the press, on the platform, or
in the pulpit,’ the pseudo-Quakers had proved to be a menace because of
their inability to accept that the League was not a peace-organisation as
they understood that term, but an organisation consecrated to the pre-
vention of war and that this entailed a commitment to mutual assistance
should a member be attacked.^369
Borrowing from a speech of Lord (Robert John) Parker in 1918 in
which Parker underlined the importance of stabilising the foundations of
the League, Zimmern referred to this commitment as the principle of the
‘Hue and Cry’. In the words of Parker, according to this principle the
‘hand of every man is against the wrong doer. He becomes an outlaw’.
For Zimmern, the League’s failure concerned the tacit abandonment
by the great powers of the Hue and Cry, an abandonment which dated
from September 18, 1931, when Japan violated the covenant, the Pact of
Paris and the Nine-Power Washington Treaty.^370
(^366) Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 226–28, 267.
(^367) Kohn, Review of Frieden und Abendland, by Ernst Ferger; The Twenty Years’ Crisis
1919–1939, by Edward Hallett Carr; and Modern Political Doctrines, by Alfred Zimmern,
- For the dates between which Zimmern delivered his on spiritual values and world
affairs, see his preface to Alfred Zimmern, Spiritual Values and World Affairs (London:
Oxford University Press, 1939).
(^368) Kohn, Review: Frieden und Abendland by Ernst Ferger; The Twenty Years’ Crisis
1919–1939 by Edward Hallett Carr; Modern Political Doctrines by Alfred Zimmern, 153.
(^369) Zimmern, Spiritual Values and World Affairs, 117–19.
(^370) Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 176, 418, 485.