346 J.-A. PEMBERTON
this way of judging political issues had been ‘amply justified by subse-
quent events.’^379
The outbreak of war in Europe was quickly seized upon by those who
had argued the case for collective security in the 1930s as a vindication
of their stance. In an article published in the Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science in July 1940, Cecil condemned
those who had cried in the face of aggression that it was ‘unreason-
able or even immoral to ask that British blood and treasure should be
expected to defend distant countries’ and who urged that Britain should
avoid ‘commitments’. Cecil observed that Britain and France, the ‘nat-
ural leaders’ of the League, had chosen to avoid their responsibilities no
matter the consequences for the Chinese, the Abyssinians and Czechs.
He noted that having avoided their responsibilities the leaders of these
countries had proclaimed in front of their countrymen and ‘still more
their countrywomen...[that] they had kept them out of war’. Cecil then
pointed out that ‘in the end...[their]...policy was not even successful in
its avowed object, as unhappily we have seen.’^380
At the very time when Cecil’s piece was published in the Annals,
a debate was taking place in the United Stated between those who
favoured American military aid to the allied cause and those who
adhered to policy of national isolation. This was the beginning of
so-called ‘battle of committees’: the battle between the American
Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies on the one hand,
and the America First and the No Foreign Wars Committees on
the other.^381 It is testimony to the ignominy into which the policy of
appeasement had quickly fallen, that it was invoked by American pro-
ponents of United States’ military intervention in the war in Europe
in order to shame those who insisted on continued American isolation.
Frederick L. Schumann, in an essay entitled ‘War, Peace, and the Balance
of Power,’ counselled that
(^379) Kohn, Review: Frieden und Abendland, by Ernst Ferger; The Twenty Years Crisis
1919–1939, by Edward Hallett Carr; and Modern Political Doctrines, by Alfred Zimmern,
153.
(^380) Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, ‘Peace Through International Co-operation,’ Annals of
the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 210, no. 1 (1940): 57–65, 61.
(^381) Simpson, ‘The Commission to Study the Organization of Peace,’ 317–18.