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PSIR · PALGRAVE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
The Story of
International Relations,
Part One
Cold-Blooded Idealists
Jo-Anne Pemberton
Palgrave Studies in International Relations
Series Editors
Mai’a K. Davis Cross
Northeastern University
Boston, MA, USA
Benjamin de Carvalho
Norwegian Institute of International Affairs
Oslo, Norway
Shahar Hameiri
University of Queensland
St. Lucia, QLD, Australia
Knud Erik Jørgensen

University of Aarhus
Aarhus, Denmark
Ole Jacob Sending

Norwegian Institute of International Affairs
Oslo, Norway
Ayşe Zarakol
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK
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University, Denmark, and at Yaşar University, Izmir, Turkey.
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Jo-Anne Pemberton
The Story of
International
Relations, Part One
Cold-Blooded Idealists
Jo-Anne Pemberton
School of Social Sciences
University of New South Wales
Sydney, NSW, Australia
Palgrave Studies in International Relations

ISBN 978-3-030-14330-5 ISBN 978-3-030-14331-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14331-2
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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Acknowledgements
I am considerably indebted to a number of people who have supported me

in preparing this manuscript. I thank members of my family: Mark, Sally,
Gail and Gregory Pemberton. I also thank Helen Pringle for her support.
Many thanks to Peter Carman and Jean-Michel Ageron-Blanc, president
and chef d’enterprise respectively, of the Paris American Academy, for their
generous assistance during my stays in Paris. I am especially grateful to the
following archivists: Jens Bol, Mahmoud Ghander and Steve Nyong. Their
help and expertise made it possible for me to access archival records and
other materials of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s held in the UNESCO
Archives in Paris.
v
Contents
1 The League of Nations and the Study of International

Relations 1
2 The League of Nations and Origins of the International

Studies Conference 71
3 The Paris Peace Conference, Racial Equality and the

Shandong Question157
4 The Quest for a Machinery of Cooperation in the Pacific:

The Covenant Rejected, the Washington Conference and
the 1924 Exclusion Laws241
5 The Institute of Pacific Relations 1927–1929 and the

Evolution of the International Studies Conference 1928–
1930315
vii
viii Contents
6 International Studies in 1931: From Copenhagen to

Shanghai397
7 The Lessons of Manchuria467
Index579
Abbreviations
BCCIS British Coordinating Committee for International Studies

BIIA British Institute of International Affairs
CFR Council on Foreign Relations
CISSIR Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International
Relations
CLON Commission of the League of Nations
DNVP Deutschnationale Volkspartei
FPA Foreign Policy Association
GIIR Geneva Institute of International Relations
GRC Geneva Research Center
IAP Institut für Auswärtige Politik
ICIC International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation
IICI Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle
IIIC International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation
ILO International Labour Organization
IPR Institute of Pacific Relations
ISC International Studies Conference
ISIPR International Secretariat of the Institute of Pacific Relations
JCIPR Japanese Council of the IPR
LNU League of Nations Union
LON League of Nations
LSE London School of Economics and Political Science
NSDAP National Socialist German Workers’ Party
OIC Organisation of Intellectual Cooperation
OJ Official Journal (of the League of Nations)
PID Political Intelligence Department
RIIA Royal Institute of International Affairs
ix
x ABBREVIATIONS
SDN Société des Nations

UA UNESCO Archives
UIA Union of International Associations
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation at the side of the

Palais Royal in Paris 2
Fig. 2.1 The signing of the Kellogg Pact by the German Gustav Stresemann.
1928. Place: Paris 71
Fig. 2.2 Kellogg-Briand Pact, with signatures of Gustav Stresemann, Paul
Kellogg, Paul Hymans, Aristide Briand, Lord Cushendun,
William Lyon Mackenzie King, John McLachlan, Sir Christopher
James Parr, Jacobus Stephanus Smit, William Thomas Cosgrave,
Count Gaetano Manzoni, Count Uchida, A. Zaleski, Eduard
Benes72
Fig. 3.1 Council of Four at the WWI Paris Peace Conference, May 27,
1919 (candid photo) (L–R): Prime Minister David Lloyd George
(Great Britain), Premier Vittorio Orlando (Italy), French Prime
Minister Georges Clemenceau and US President Woodrow
Wilson158
Fig. 3.2 Japanese peace delegates in 1919 with Makino Nobuaki 159
Fig. 4.1 The Conference on Limitations of Armaments, Washington 242
Fig. 4.2 The Punahou School in Honolulu where the first conference of
the Institute of Pacific Relations took place in 1925 243
Fig. 5.1 Old engraving of the building of the School of Politics
(Schinkelsche Bauakademie) 316
Fig. 5.2 International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (League
of Nations). Plenary Session in the Palais Wilson, between 1924
and 1927 317
xi
xii List of Figures
Fig. 6.1 The Chinese delegation addresses the Council of the League
of Nations following the Mukden Incident 397
Fig. 6.2 Portrait of the attendees of the Fourth Biennial Conference
of the Institute of Pacific Relations 398
Fig. 7.1 Lytton Commission in Shanghai, 1932 468
CHAPTER 1
The League of Nations and the Study

of International Relations
International Studies in the Interwar Years

This study traces the development of the academic subject of international
relations, or what was often referred to in the interwar years as interna-
tional studies, within the framework of the Organisation of Intellectual
Cooperation (OIC) of the League of Nations (LON). In this regard, its
focus rests on an institution which came to be known as the International
Studies Conference (ISC) and which commenced life at a meeting in
Berlin in 1928. The determination to avert another European war and the
zeal for international organisation engendered by the creation of the LON
were key factors behind the formation of the ISC. Its founders hoped that
through furthering the institutional development of the study of interna-
tional relations, they would help foster mutual comprehension among
peoples and help entrench the LON system. Indeed, the aforementioned
Berlin meeting was itself intended to serve as an instrument of interna-
tional rapprochement and as a means of reinforcing the LON. The choice
of Berlin as the location for the meeting, which was initiated and organ-
ised by the OIC’s Paris-based executive arm, namely, the International
Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC), must be viewed in light of
Germany’s entry into the LON in September 1926 and, more particularly,
the desire to further harmonise Franco-German relations. The organisers
of the Berlin meeting were acutely aware that in the absence of
© The Author(s) 2020 1

J.-A. Pemberton, The Story of International Relations, Part One,
Palgrave Studies in International Relations,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14331-2_1
2 J.-A. PEMBERTON
Fig. 1.1 International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation at the side of the

Palais Royal in Paris. Source: Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication/
Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine
ranco-German rapprochement there could be no assurance of peace and

F
security in Europe.
This study does not claim that the year 1919 marks the birth of inter-
national relations as an academic discipline. Courses in the field of interna-
tional law and diplomatic history had long been offered in academic
institutions in Europe and North America. Furthermore, generalist
courses on international affairs under such rubrics as Contemporary Politics
had been introduced into the curricula of American universities as early as
1900. Yet what needs to be underlined is the fact that almost all of those
1 THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AND THE STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL… 3
involved in promoting the study of international relations in the interwar

years believed that they were engaged in a new intellectual enterprise. This
partly explains why this study traces the development of international
studies in the period after the end of the Great War or what later became
known as the First World War.
The other main factor explaining my temporal starting point is the
birth of the LON. For the purposes of this study, this organisation is sig-
nificant in two mutually informing respects. First, the LON was deeply
involved in the development of the study of international relations, above
all, through its intellectual organs. Second, a prime motivation behind the
promotion of such study was the desire to see a hardening of the norms
enshrined in the LON Covenant. In this way, the development of the dis-
cipline of international relations can be seen as a component of a larger
enterprise: it was a feature of the new world order which was proclaimed
and which began to be instituted at the end of the First World War. Indeed,
the cultivation of the study of international relations was viewed exactly in
this light by many of its partisans.
It should be emphasised that the ISC was not the first attempt at organ-
ising the study of international relations on an international basis. That
honour must go to the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), a body that
resulted from a meeting of representatives of nations bordering the Pacific
in mid-1925 in Honolulu and whose membership soon came to include
non-Pacific powers with imperial interests in the region. It is important to
note that in the official literature produced by the IPR’s international sec-
retariat (ISIPR) in the IPR’s early years, the IPR was far from being rep-
resented as a strictly regional organisation. To the contrary, the IPR’s
secretariat stressed the point that the Pacific was a crucial arena of world
politics and that the IPR was a body engaged in international relations
research. In this connection, it is also noteworthy that from 1927 down to
1945, observers from the LON and the International Labour Organization
(ILO) attended IPR conferences. This study discusses the IPR at length.
A key reason for this concerns the fact that as an international organisation
engaged in collaborative research on international problems, the IPR was
the principal model for the ISC. Further to this, the IPR served as a yard-
stick against which the ISC would be measured on various occasions
throughout its life. That these two bodies had overlapping memberships
and that the IPR was a constant fixture at ISC conferences from 1929 to
1949 are of relevance in this context.
4 J.-A. PEMBERTON
To the extent that the IPR might be viewed as a largely regional organ-
isation, it cannot be seen as different in kind from the ISC: the members
of the latter body were predominantly European, and their eyes were
trained mainly on European affairs. In fact, American and Canadian mem-
bers occasionally criticised the ISC because of its bias towards Europe. To
its credit, the ISC sought to rectify this situation. For example, repeated
approaches were made by the ISC’s secretariat to Chinese and Japanese
institutions in the hope that they would join the conference. These
approaches met with a degree of success.
Another reason for dwelling on the IPR is that its activities show that
concentrated scholarly thinking about international relations both in
abstract and in concrete terms was not confined to countries such as
France, Great Britain and the United States in the years after 1918. It is
true that the institutional development of the study of international rela-
tions was most advanced in these three countries at the time, above all, in
the United States. Yet insights into the nature and conduct of interna-
tional relations developed in the interwar period by individuals and groups
located outside these centres of power and influence should not be over-
looked. Such insights certainly were not overlooked at the time, as evi-
denced by the very positive international reputation enjoyed by the IPR
and the ISC’s ongoing attempts to establish a membership that repre-
sented the greater part of the globe.
Both the IPR and the ISC served as forums in which the major political
controversies of the interwar period were rehearsed. In the case of the
IPR, this point largely relates to its conference discussions concerning
Chinese efforts to re-establish China’s autonomy and unfolding events in
Manchuria. In the case of the ISC, this point largely relates to debates tak-
ing place in the years between 1934 and 1937 on the topics of collective
security and peaceful change. These debates well demonstrate that the
defence of the League system by interwar students of international affairs
in the face of the challenges confronting it was generally based on hard-
headed political calculations. Indeed, partisans of the LON often discussed
the conditions giving rise to the political crises of the interwar years in
terms ‘as frank as those of any blood-and-iron historian,’ to borrow Frank
M. Russell’s description of the analysis of the disarmament question issued
by Salvador de Madariaga who headed the Disarmament Section of the
LON Secretariat between 1922 and 1928.1
1
Frank M. Russell, Theories of International Relations (New York: D. Appleton-Century,
1936), 441–2. Madariaga joined the secretariat in 1921.
The ISC’s discussions of the topics of collective security and peaceful

change are of historical interest because they overlap with the debate con-
cerning appeasement and provide us with further insights into the concep-
tual environment in which that increasingly polarised debate occurred.
What we also obtain from examining these discussions are instructive illus-
trations of the rhetorical manoeuvres performed on behalf of the Hitler
regime with a view to manipulating foreign opinion in its favour. A good
example of the above was on display at the 1937 conference of the ISC
where a senior Nazi propagandist gave vent to the German grievance
about the fact that Germany had been stripped of its colonial possessions
under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. In the forum of the 1937 con-
ference of the ISC, the same propagandist mounted a detailed argument
to the effect that the retrocession of the German colonies was a matter of
law and justice, an argument accompanied by a vague hint that should
Germany’s former colonies not be returned to Germany, there might be
trouble ahead. Of further historical interest in regard to the 1937 confer-
ence was the discussion within its framework of what was referred to as the
colonial problem, a discussion which served to further prise open the colo-
nial question in a way favourable to a policy of decolonisation.
The Origins of Intellectual Cooperation

My account of the development of the study of international affairs in the
years between the First and Second World Wars and in the early post-war
period is mostly chronological. Before embarking on this account, I want
to elaborate on the origins, institutionalisation and guiding philosophy of
the OIC because it was this organisation that provided the institutional
and, importantly, the cultural setting in which much of what is discussed
in this study takes place.
The OIC can be seen as the culminating point of the profusion of activ-
ity taking place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in
regard to international intellectual cooperation. An inspirational figure in
this regard was Léon Bourgeois, an adherent of France’s Radical Party
(Parti radical) who emerged as a leading statesman. The degree of influence
exercised by Bourgeois over many years caused Julien Luchaire, the first
director of the IIIC, to describe him as that ‘remarquable pontife de la
Troisième République.’2 Of more significance in this context is another
2
Julien Luchaire, Confessions d’un Français moyen, vol. 2, 1914–1950 (Florence: Leo
S. Olschki, 1965), 81–2. See also Danielle Wünsch, ‘Einstein et la Commission i nternationale
6 J.-A. PEMBERTON
description that Bourgeois earned: ‘apostle’ of international intellectual

cooperation.3 Speaking in his capacity as minister for public instruction in
1891 at a congress of savants, Bourgeois called for the institution of
arrangements that would ensure that new discoveries in all those fields
into which scientific method had penetrated were ‘systematically dove-
tailed into the existing body of knowledge.’4 In this context, Bourgeois’s
motive was not solely pedagogical: he saw in the systematic integration of
scientific knowledge a template for integration in the wider social arena. In
a study called Solidarité (1896), Bourgeois sought to ‘establish on the
scientific doctrines of natural solidarity a practical doctrine of moral and
social solidarity,’ involving ‘a rule specifying the duties and rights of each
in the interdependent action of all.’5
Bourgeois gave expression to such a doctrine as the premier French
delegate at the Conferences of the Peace at The Hague in 1899 and 1907,
where he enunciated the ‘principle of international solidarity,’ the actual
and growing ‘solidarity of nations’ and the existence of a ‘véritable Société
des nations.’6 Accordingly, the preambles to The Hague Declaration
(1899) and The Hague Convention (1907) on the Pacific Settlement of
International Disputes affirmed ‘the solidarity which unites the members
of the society of civilised nations.’7 Bourgeois, who would go on to win
the Nobel Peace Prize in 1920, elaborated on the thinking behind and
implications of these pronouncements in a work appearing in 1910 enti-
tled Pour la Société des Nations, stating therein that
ideas are also facts, or, as people say, forces. We speak of a politique réaliste: it
is an incomplete, blind réalisme that does not hold account of ideas in the
de coopération intellectuelle,’ Revue d’histoire des sciences 57, no. 2 (2004): 509–20, 510.
3
Charles André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle (Rennes: Imprimerie
Provinciale de l’Ouest, 1938), 41.
4
F. C. S. Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations:
Its Conceptual Basis and lessons for the present (PhD diss., University of London, 1953), 243.
F. C. S. Northedge cites a speech given by Bourgeois at the general session of the Congrès
de Sociétés Savantes in Paris, May 27, 1891. See also Léon Bourgeois, Solidarité (Paris:
Armand Colin et Cie, 1896), 13–4, classiques.uqac.ca/Cclassiques/bourgeois_leon/soli-
darite/solidarite.html.
5
Bourgeois, Solidarité, 30.
6
Léon Bourgeois, Pour la Société des Nations (Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1910),
106, 167, 259. Emphasis added. See also Wünsch, ‘Einstein et la Commission internationale
de coopération intellectuelle,’ 510–1.
7
Bourgeois, Pour la Société des Nations, 48.
estimation of the apparent facts and in the calculations of the active forces …
[P]ublic opinion acts each day more powerfully on the direction of general
affairs and this opinion is more and more directed itself by two growing
forces: one of the moral order, the increasing respect for the life of the
human person; the other of the material order, the ever tightening eco-
nomic solidarity of nations. These two forces tend to the same end: respect
for the law and the maintenance of peace.8
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an increasing

number of international congresses of an intellectual character.9 A very
important institution in this regard was the Union of International
Associations (UIA), which was established in 1910 at what the UIA later
described as the ‘First World Congress’ and in which 132 non-governmental
international organisations participated. The key figures behind this con-
gress were two Belgians, namely, Henri La Fontaine and Paul Otlet, both
of whom had spent the previous two decades seeking to organise knowl-
edge along the lines suggested by Bourgeois.10 Obtaining a membership
comprised of 230 unofficial international associations by 1914 and in
receipt of the support of the Belgian government and the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, the stated purpose of the UIA con-
sisted in ‘the elaboration of a world organization, founded on law, scien-
tific progress and technique, and on the free representation of out the
common interests of humanity.’11 It is thus not surprising that after the
war the UIA emerged, as stated by Sir Eric Drummond, the LON’s first
secretary-general, as one of the staunchest supporters of the LON, a draft
covenant for which the UIA had prepared before the war’s end.12 Indeed,
8
Ibid., 23–4. Emphasis added.
9
Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 241–2.
10
Union des Associations Internationales, Publication no. 98, August 1921, quoted ibid.,
248. On role of La Fontaine and Otlet, see Northedge, International Intellectual
Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 244.
11
Mémoire de Secrétaire Général de la Société des Nations sur l’activité educative et
l’organisation du travail intellectuel accomplies par l’Union des Associations internationals,
1921, quoted in Pham Thi-Tu, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations (Paris:
Librairie Minard, 1962), 13. On the support given by the Belgian government and the
Carnegie Endowment for the UIA, see Jean-Jacques Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée: La Société des
Nations et la Coopération Intellectuelle (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999), 13.
12
Jan Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation: The League Experience and the
Beginnings of UNESCO (Wroclaw: Zaclad Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1962), 18.
8 J.-A. PEMBERTON
the UIA was described by contemporary students of the LON as ‘one of

the chief pioneers of the idea of a League of Nations.’13
On February 5, 1919, the UIA presented a petition to the Peace
Conference in Paris which called for the covenant of the proposed LON
to include a charter for ‘Intellectual and Moral interests.’14 Although this
petition had little impact, the Belgian government submitted to the Peace
Conference on March 24, 1919, an amendment to the covenant to the
effect that it would provide for an international committee on intellectual
relations in order to promote the ‘development of moral, scientific and
artistic international relations among diverse peoples and promote, by
every means, the formation of an international spirit.’15 As this proposal
also failed to elicit much enthusiasm, it was withdrawn by the Belgian
delegate, namely, Paul Hymans, in the conference’s commission on the
LON ‘without discussion.’16
There are a number of explanations for the lack of interest in such pro-
posals. For example, H. R. G. Greaves, in his 1931 study of the committees
of the LON, pointed to a desire on the part of certain delegates to the peace
conference to not complicate the covenant with ‘unnecessary matter.’ As the
conference proceeded, a view emerged in some circles, especially in American
and British circles, that the nascent LON was already overburdened in an
organisational sense.17 In relation to this last point, Henri Bonnet, a former
member of LON’s secretariat who went on to replace Luchaire as director
of the IIIC, noted that as a result of the war, the international commu-
nity found itself facing major tasks in the fields of economic and social recon-
struction and that in view of this, the conference endowed the LON with
multiple technical organisations. As Bonnet further noted, although the war
had severely disrupted intellectual life, the problems in that area were in
13
H. R. G. Greaves, The League Committees and World Order (London: Oxford University
Press, 1931), 112 and André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 29–30.
14
Greaves, League Committees and World Order, 113.
15
David Hunter Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 2 (New York: G. B. Putnam’s
Sons, 1928), 522. See also Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations,
17–8; Greaves, League Committees and World Order, 114; and F. R. Cowell ‘Planning The
Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’ Journal of World History 10,
no. 1 (1966): 210–36, 219.
16
Greaves, League Committees and World Order, 113. See also Pham, La Coopération
Intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 18; Cowell ‘Planning The Organisation of UNESCO,
1942–1946,’ 219.
17
Greaves, League Committees and World Order, 113. See also Kolasa, International
Intellectual Co-operation, 19.
some ways less visible than or were simply ‘overshadowed’ by the enormous
problems in the economic and social areas.18 Finally in this context, we
might note the observation of Nitobe Inazō, one of the LON’s first under-
secretaries-general, that ‘a certain number of members—considered that the
League of Nations was first and foremost a political organisation which
should not dissipate its efforts to too great an extent.’19 Madariaga
later stated that on this point the British were ‘adamant’: the British view
was that the ‘League was to be a League, not a Society; it was to deal with
peace and war, not with humdrum facts and relations between nations.’20
Irrespective of the attitude described by Nitobe and Madariaga, non-
government organisations continued to pressure the LON to act in the
field of intellectual cooperation. At the Third Conference of the
Associations for the League of Nations in December 1919, representatives
of the UIA won support for a resolution which demanded that the LON
‘encourage and direct initiatives in the domain of the sciences and of
education.’21 Subsequently, the Paris-based European Council of the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace sent to the LON Secretariat
a resolution adopted at the council’s meeting of February 15, 1920, which
asked that the assembly fund chairs in international relations. It also rec-
ommended that the LON should play a leading role in the creation of an
‘international organisation for the promulgation of reliable and indepen-
dent information with a view to preventing international conflicts.’22
On July 8, 1920, Paul Appell, rector of the University of Paris, com-
municated to Drummond the contents of a resolution passed by the
French Association of the League of Nations at a meeting of its executive
committee (of which Appell was president), on June 21.23 The resolution
demanded that the LON establish as soon as possible an international
office of intellectual and educational relations: ‘a permanent organisation
18
Henri Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization (Washington: American
Council on Public Affairs, 1942), 4. See also Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation,
19.
19
Minutes of the Intellectual Committee on Intellectual Co-operation, 1923, quoted in
Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 334.
20
Salvador de Madariaga, ‘Gilbert Murray and the League,’ in Jean Smith and Arnold
Toynbee eds., Gilbert Murray: An Unfinished Autobiography (London: George Allen and
Unwin, 1960), 194–5.
21
Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 13.
22
23
André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 31.
10 J.-A. PEMBERTON
of intellectual work, analogous to the one which existed for manual work,’
that is, the ILO.24
This resolution was accompanied by a draft convention which had been
prepared by Luchaire (then chef de cabinet of the French minister of edu-
cation), which outlined a detailed plan for what Luchaire referred to as a
Permanent Organisation for the Promotion of International Understanding
and Collaboration in Educational Questions and in Science, Literature
and Art.25 Brussels and Paris were not the only sources of pressure: propo-
sitions regarding the creation of an organisation addressing intellectual
cooperation emanated from associations and institutions based in Cracow,
Geneva, London, New York, Oxford and Vienna.26 The first official steps
in the direction of intellectual cooperation within the framework of the
LON occurred when at the eighth session of a meeting held at Saint-
Sébastien between July 30 and August 5, 1920, the Council of LON con-
sidered a plan submitted to it by the UIA.27 The UIA asked the council to
support its plan for what it termed an International University: its plan for
the convening of summer schools in Brussels with the purpose of fostering
‘an elite of some thousands of minds’ who would cooperate in the promo-
tion of ‘international understanding and in the work of the League of
Nations.’28 The UIA also requested a subvention to assist it in the publica-
tion of a Code des voeux et résolutions des congrès internationaux: a
24
Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 20 and S. H. Bailey,
International Studies in Modern Education (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 5n.
For a somewhat different account of the form of this resolution, see André, L’Organisation
de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 31.
25
Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 20. For further discussion of Luchaire’s
role, see Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations,
274–5 and Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 13. Jean-Jacques Renoliet notes that at its congress in
Brussels in September 1920, the UIA called for an international conference to be held in
order to draft the statutes of an international organisation for intellectual work. This idea was
also taken up at the fourth conference of the League of Nations Associations in Milan in
October 1920. See also André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 31. André
points out that Luchaire was charged with this task at Milan.
26
Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 18.
27
André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 34, 37.
28
Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 13. See also Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société
des Nations, 18 and Bailey, International Studies in Modern Education, 7n. Stanley Hartnoll
Bailey points out that a so-called International University functioned between September 5
and 20, 1920, in Brussels. In attendance were forty-seven professors and one hundred stu-
dents. The main focus of its syllabus was on (1) international questions of a legal, economic
and technical character; (2) comparative studies of history and contemporary international
ublication involving the ‘coordination of the principal desiderata in all

p
the domains of international life.’29
The discussion of these proposals at the council took place following a
presentation of a report prepared by Bourgeois in the course of which he
praised the UIA’s achievements and the service it had rendered to private
international associations and acknowledged the utility of the proposed
international university and its planned programme of studies. However,
Bourgeois then stated that as this university had yet to be established, it
would be ‘premature’ to accord to it League ‘patronage.’30 Rather, he sug-
gested that the council should send to the UIA an ‘expression of all its
sympathy’ for its new undertaking, wish it every success and authorise the
secretariat to assist the UIA ‘in the measure possible, in the realization of
… [this] … work of international interest.’31 Deferring to the opinions
expressed by its ‘eminent rapporteur,’ the council decided to accord
‘moral encouragement’ rather than financial support to the planned inter-
national university. Nonetheless, the council agreed to allocate the funds
requested by the UIA for the publication of the proposed Code des voeux
et résolutions des congrès internationaux as it considered that such a publi-
cation would be of great value to the LON Secretariat and to the manifold
private international organisations.32
On December 13, 1920, during the First Assembly of the LON and
following a successful attempt by France’s Gabriel Hanotaux to ward off a
proposed resolution authored by La Fontaine favourable to the teaching
of Esperanto, discussion of the question of intellectual cooperation
commenced.33 On that same day, a motion was put forward by delegates
representing Belgium, Italy and Romania, suggesting that the assembly
invite the council to pay close attention to the work currently being under-
taken in the field of international intellectual cooperation, to possibly
accord to this work its patronage and ‘to present to the assembly, during
institutions; and (3) the League of Nations. For the history of the UIA’s proposal, see André,
L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 34–6.
29
André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 34–6 and Pham, La coopération
intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 18.
30
Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 18–9 and Northedge,
International Intellectual Co-operation, 261.
31
Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 19.
32
Ibid.
33
Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 14. Renoliet observes that Gabriel Hanotaux’s action was in
order to defend the French language.
12 J.-A. PEMBERTON
its next session, a detailed report on the educational influence which they
are called upon to exercise on the formation of a liberal spirit of under-
standing and world-wide co-operation.’34 Importantly also, the motion
called upon the council to investigate the utility of establishing a technical
organisation dedicated to the organisation of intellectual work.35 As this
motion concerned the creation of a new technical organisation, it was sent
to the assembly’s Second Committee, the mandate of which concerned
technical organisations, for its consideration.36 The committee endorsed
the resolution without hesitation and assigned the Belgian delegate,
namely, La Fontaine, who remained secretary-general of the UIA, the task
of reporting on the committee’s view to the assembly.37
The report that La Fontaine presented was entitled Report on the
Organization of Intellectual Labour, and therein La Fontaine recalled the
advances that had been made in the field of intellectual cooperation in the
preceding decades and insisted on the need to ‘give more force and more
power to human thought.’38 Most importantly, La Fontaine stated in his
report that ‘there should be placed, at the crown’ of the LON’s technical
organisations in the fields of labour, hygiene, economics, communications
and transit, a technical organisation ‘devoted to the world’s intellect.’39
34
Actes de la Première Assemblée, Séance plenière, December 1920, quoted in Pham, La
coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 21. See also Northedge, International
Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 278.
35
Actes de la Première Assemblée, Séance plenière, December 1920, quoted in Pham, La
coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 21.
36
Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 21n, 24. Following a gen-
eral discussion of the activities of the council, the LON Assembly at each session would dis-
tribute the questions that required examination among six committees. The First Committee
addressed constitutional and juridical questions; the Third Committee addressed disarma-
ment; the Fourth Committee addressed budgetary and administrative questions; the Fifth
Committee addressed social questions and the Sixth Committee addressed political ques-
tions. Questions concerning Intellectual Cooperation were addressed by the Fifth Committee
in 1921 and 1923, by the Second Committee in 1922 and from 1924 to 1927, by the Sixth
Committee in 1928, by the Second Committee from 1929 to 1930 and then by the Sixth
Committee from 1931 to the outbreak of the war.
37
Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 19–21. See also André,
L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 39.
38
Greaves, League Committees and World Order, 115.
39
Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 20. See also Pham, La coopération intel-
lectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 21; Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation
Within the League of Nations, 279; and André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle,
38.
La Fontaine’s proposal met with lively resistance from George Nicoll

Barnes, a delegate of Great Britain, who advised against encouraging intel-
lectuals to come to the LON ‘demanding alms’ rather than seeking funds
for their activities in their own countries.40 Barnes complained that creat-
ing an intellectual equivalent of the ILO, aside from being unnecessary
given the ILO’s capabilities, would serve to reinforce the distinction
between intellectual and manual work, a distinction which in a democratic
age was otherwise ‘tending to disappear.’41 Despite these objections, the
assembly adopted the report, passing a unanimous resolution in which it
expressed its wholehearted approval of the ‘moral and material support’
that the council had accorded the UIA. It requested that the council
should continue to ‘participate in a large measure in the efforts tending to
realise the international organisation of intellectual work’ and that it
should present to the next assembly a report in the form specified in the
motion put forward by the Belgian, Italian and Romanian delegates on
December 13.42
The council addressed the assembly’s resolution of December 18 on
March 1, 1921, at its twelfth session. It examined two options in this con-
text: whether the UIA should be transformed into a technical organisation
of the LON or whether an entirely new organisation should be created. In
the report adopted by the council which had been prepared by the Spanish
delegate José María Quiñones de León, it was noted that before deciding
on either of these options, it was necessary to know whether the LON’s
members ‘were ready for an enterprise similar to the institution’ of the
ILO and, assuming a response in the affirmative, whether the LON ‘dis-
posed of sufficient financial means in order to support such an
organization.’43
Based on views expressed at the First Assembly concerning LON
expenses, the report concluded that ‘in the current situation of the world,
40
Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 22. See also Northedge,
International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 279.
41
Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 22 and Northedge,
International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 279. See also Hsu Fu
Teh, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel (Paris: Marcel Rivière,
1929), 33.
42
Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 19–22. See also Northedge,
International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 278–9 and Renoliet,
L’Unesco oubliée, 15.
43
Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations 22–3.
14 J.-A. PEMBERTON
what can best favour intellectual co-operation is private effort … [and] …

that the League can, for the moment, render a greater service to this cause
in helping these initiatives, than in trying to organise intellectual work.’44
Such a conclusion would appear to have favoured the UIA option. It is
thus noteworthy that at the council session of March 1, Bourgeois recalled
Luchaire’s proposal for an office of education which would be charged
with promoting the idea of international cooperation and which had been
adopted by the Fourth International Conference of the League of Nations
Associations in October 1920.45 This proposal, which was inserted in the
report of Quiñones de León, was also adopted by the council, although
financial concerns and a disinclination to expand the role of the LON sug-
gested that it was unlikely that the plan for a new organisation would find
favour in the end.46
At its thirteenth session on June 27, the council charged the secretary-
general with preparing a report on these various options for the benefit of
the Second Assembly. The resultant report comprised two detailed memo-
randa. The first of these memoranda elaborated on the activities of the
UIA, noting its desire to collaborate with the LON and to even find a
permanent place within that organisation.47 The second of the two memo-
randa ‘underlined the importance of international intellectual and educa-
tional collaboration, notably in what concerns the intellectual and moral
development of national collectivities, scientific activity, and even in order
to favour the development of the League of Nations.’48 In connection
with this second memorandum, it should be noted that in his report to the
council, the secretary-general insisted that the LON could not ‘pursue any
of its aims, either the general aims of co-operation as laid down in the
covenant, or even its more precise aims such as the campaign against the
use of dangerous drugs and against the traffic in women and children,
without, at every moment, encountering educational problems, and with-
out being obliged to ask for active help from those engaged in education
44
Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 15 and Ministres des Affaires étrangères. 1921, quoted in
45
46
Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 22 and Renoliet, L’Unesco
oubliée, 16.
47
Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 23. See also André,
L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 40–1 and Hsu, L’activité de la Société des
Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 35.
48
Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 23.
in all countries.’49 At the same time, however, the secretary-general also

determined that it would be ‘premature’ at this point to establish a new
technical organisation. In order to ensure against an unnecessary duplica-
tion of work being undertaken by existing organisations, he suggested
that a study of the terrain be conducted and that for this purpose a provi-
sional consultative committee be established under the auspices of
the council.50
Jean-Jacques Renoliet, the author of a comprehensive history of the
OIC, points out that Drummond’s caution in this matter was a result of
advice given to him by Jean Monnet, the under-secretary-general in charge
of internal administration. Monnet suggested to Drummond that for rea-
sons of cost and reasons of a non-fiscal nature, a proposal for a permanent
organisation would ‘encounter the opposition of the assembly and par-
ticularly of the British Dominions.’51 Renoliet notes that such caution was
deplored by Bourgeois, a feeling that was reflected in a report that
Bourgeois submitted to the council entitled The Organization of
Intellectual Labour.52 Therein, Bourgeois contended that it was in fact
international intellectual cooperation that had given birth to the LON,
stating that ‘if an international intellectual life had not been long existent,
our League would never have been formed.’53 Continuing in this vein,
Bourgeois declared that ‘[n]o association of nations can hope to exist
without the spirit of reciprocal intellectual activity among its members,’
and he called on the LON ‘to take steps to show how closely the political
idea which it represents is connected with all aspects of the intellectual life
which unites nations.’ Indeed, Bourgeois stated that the LON had ‘no
task more urgent than that of examining … [those] … great factors of
international opinion—the systems and methods of education, and scien-
tific and philosophical research.’54 Nonetheless, Bourgeois took care in his
report to ‘disarm the critics by deprecating ambitiousness’ and by restrict-
ing his recommendations to what was ‘immediately feasible’ in light of the
49
League of Nations [hereafter LON], Official Journal [hereafter OJ], no. 12. (1921),
1111. For the secretary-general’s statement in full, see Pham, La coopération intellectuelle
sous la Société des Nations, 27.
50
Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 23. See also Northedge,
International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 280–1.
51
52
Ibid.
53
LON, OJ, no. 12. (1921), 1105.
54
Ibid. See also Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization, 6 and Kolasa,
International Intellectual Co-operation, 21.
16 J.-A. PEMBERTON
‘climate of feeling’ in the assembly at the time.55 Thus, irrespective of the

title of his report, Bourgeois acknowledged that the situation of intellec-
tual workers ‘fell more directly within the competence of the ILO.’56
The council adopted the reports of Drummond and Bourgeois at its
meeting of September 2, 1921, and charged the latter with presenting to
the Second Assembly a resolution he had drafted for adoption by that
body.57 The text of this resolution invited the council to appoint a com-
mittee comprised of not more than twelve members, which would serve as
a consultative organ of the council in regard to ‘the study of questions of
international intellectual cooperation and of education.’58 It recom-
mended that this committee would submit a report to the next assembly
‘on the measures that the League could take in view of facilitating intel-
lectual exchange among peoples, notably in what concerns the communi-
cation of scientific information and methods of education’ and that it
would undertake a study of the French plan for an international office of
education as mentioned in the council’s report of March 1.59
The resolution was sent to the assembly’s Fifth Committee, which
devoted itself to questions of a social nature, and was discussed by it
between September 8 and 10, the discussion being based on the two
memoranda prepared by Drummond and the report of Bourgeois. As a
result of this discussion, the text of the resolution was modified in two
ways. First, in order to forestall the misunderstanding that the LON was
attempting to involve itself in the domestic affairs of states in the field of
55
56
Hsu Fu Teh pointed out that a consultative commission charged with addressing ‘questions
concerning the social and economic conditions of intellectual workers’ was established within
the framework of the ILO in March 1927. Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le
domaine intellectuel, 76.
57
André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 40–1 and Pham, La coopération
intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 23–4.
58
LON, OJ, no. 12. (1921), 1105. Northedge notes that the services of the members of
the Committee were to be ‘unpaid, apart from travelling expenses.’ Northedge, International
Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 287. See also Malcolm W. Davis,
‘Experiences of the Committee for International Cooperation,’ Journal of Educational
Sociology 20 no. 1 (1946): 49–51. Siegfried Grundmann observes that the concept of ‘intel-
lectual co-operation’ was first mentioned in the Bourgeois report. Siegfried Grundmann, The
Einstein Dossiers: Science and Politics—Einstein’s Berlin Period, trans. Ann M. Hentschel
(Berlin: Springer, 2004), 176.
59
Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 24. The number was raised
to 14 in 1924, to 15 in 1926, to 17 in 1930 and to 19 in 1937.
education, the Fifth Committee eliminated the words et d’éducation from

the formula, ‘questions internationales de coopération intellectuelle et
d’éducation,’ a move which, however, did not prevent education becom-
ing one of the ‘most fruitful branches’ of the OIC activities.60 Second and
on the urging of Norway’s Kristine Bonnevie, it was decided that women
should be included in the committee, thereby ensuring that in principle its
composition would be in harmony with LON policy concerning equality
of opportunity for men and women.61 Thus modified, the proposal was
presented to the Second Assembly by Gilbert Murray, the Australian-born
Murray serving on the occasion of that assembly as a delegate of South
Africa and as the Fifth Committee’s rapporteur. On September 21, the
Second Assembly unanimously adopted the proposal, and thus, the legal
foundation for the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation
(ICIC) was established.62
The assembly’s decision was ratified by the council on January 14,
1922, with the council allocating to the ICIC a modest sum transferred
from the budget of the international bureaux section of the secretariat in
order to cover the travel and other related costs of the members of the
prospective committee.63 This allocation of funds was the result of a des-
perate compromise, the occasion for which was the registration by an
Australian delegate of a vote opposing any funds being allocated to the
ICIC on the pretext that intellectual cooperation was not mentioned in
the Treaty of Versailles.64 In regard to its work, while the council envis-
60
Ibid., 24–5 and Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of
Nations, 18n, 285. Northedge records that Murray told him, Northedge, that Catholic
influences were more important than political objections in regard to Intellectual
Cooperation’s involvement in class-room activities. Bonnet simply notes that there were
objections on political grounds and on grounds of religious freedom. Bonnet, Intellectual
Co-operation in World Organization, 5.
61
On Kristine Bonnevie’s role, see Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 19. On LON practice in
regard to female representation, see Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation
Within the League of Nations, 286. Article 7 of the covenant declared the following: ‘All posi-
tions under or in connection with the League, including the Secretariat, shall be open equally
to men and women.’ André, L’Organisation de la Coopération Intellectuelle, 43n.
62
In his report of the Fifth Committee’s deliberations, Murray echoed Bourgeois in stat-
ing that the future of the LON depended on the ‘formation of a universal conscience.’ Pham,
La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 24–5, 27. See also Bonnet, Intellectual
Co-operation in World Organization, 6–7.
63
Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 176–7.
64
Ibid., 177.
18 J.-A. PEMBERTON
aged that the committee would focus at the outset on such matters as
organising conferences, establishing relations between universities, com-
piling bibliographies and organising exchanges of publications, it none-
theless ‘granted the greatest liberty’ in regard to the ICIC’s programme.65
That the ICIC was created was thanks to the efforts of a number of
member states, among the foremost of them being Belgium which had
hoped to see the Brussels-based UIA become a technical organisation of
the LON partly with a view to elevating Belgium’s status internationally.66
Obviously, France too played a major role in the ICIC’s creation, although
it should be noted that elements at the Quai d’Orsay, the home of the
French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, had initially resisted the idea of endow-
ing the LON with an organisation of intellectual cooperation. Renoliet
observes that such resistance stemmed in part from the concern on the
part of certain French officials that such an organisation would attempt to
interfere in national education policy in the name of internationalism, a
concern shared by officials in other countries. The other reason for the
initial French resistance, according to Renoliet, is that French officials
feared that the creation of an international intellectual organisation might
undermine French intellectual influence internationally. He notes that it
was only during the approach of the Second Assembly that the French
foreign minister, Aristide Briand, was persuaded of the worth of undertak-
ing ‘a new diplomacy aiming at the growth of French cultural influence
through the device of an international institution.’67
Belgium and France were by no means the only continental European
states to strongly support a programme of intellectual cooperation in the
Second Assembly: the Austrian, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Greek, Romanian
and Swiss delegations also voiced their support.68 One of the reasons for the
support lent to the project by other European states, in particular the new
states of Central and Eastern Europe, concerned the hope that an intellec-
tual cooperation programme might provide an opportunity for the receipt of
financial assistance and permit them to ‘get their voice heard on the interna-
tional scene’ in a way they could not in other international forums.69 In turn,
the European delegations favouring the project of intellectual cooperation,
65
Report by the German Consulate, 1922, quoted ibid.
66
67
Ibid., 21, 24.
68
Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization, 5.
69
as Bonnet later pointed out, received the strong and decisive support of
‘almost all states which were chiefly interested in problems of a universal and
general character’ and which ‘did not want to see the League confined
exclusively to European concerns.’70 Prominent within this category of states
were the republics of South America. Bonnet attributed the support of these
republics for the cause of intellectual cooperation to their extensive history
of intellectual and cultural exchange with Western Europe. Importantly,
these republics exercised considerable influence in the assembly.71 Yet his-
toric intellectual ties to Europe was not the sole motivating factor in this
context: the republics of South America saw the institutionalisation of intel-
lectual cooperation as a means of ‘cultural defence in the face of l’anglais.’72
China and India were keen supporters, doubtless because they too
wished to have a greater opportunity to have their voices heard with the
framework of the LON, thereby gaining for themselves greater interna-
tional recognition and respect.73 In relation to China, it is worth noting
the points made by Hsu Fu Teh in a doctoral thesis entitled L’activité de
la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel which was submitted to
the Faculty of Law at the University of Paris in 1929 and which was dedi-
cated to the Chinese vice-minister for foreign affairs. Hsu, a former mem-
ber of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, pointed to the age-old
character of China’ s involvement in international intellectual relations,
noting that China had entered into such relations with les Indes during the
second half of the Han dynasty and that these relations had further devel-
oped during subsequent dynasties. He further noted that under the Sui
dynasty and at the beginning of the Tang dynasty, Japan had sent a large
number of students to undertake studies in China. In addition, Hsu
pointed out that intellectual relations between China and Europe had a
long pedigree, observing that ‘some very precise forms of intellectual
cooperation, especially in the university domain, were already noted in
Middle Ages’ and that this cooperation had further developed during the
Renaissance through frequent exchanges of ideas or persons.74
In regard to India, it is worth noting Bonnet’s observation that that
country had never manifested any of the ‘reticence and even hostility’
70
Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization, 5–6.
71
Henri Bonnet, ‘La Société des Nations et la Coopération Intellectuelle,’ Journal of
World History 10 no. 1 (1966): 198–209, 201 and Davis, ‘Experiences of the Committee for
International Cooperation,’ 49.
72
73
Bonnet, Intellectual Co-operation in World Organization, 6.
74
Hsu, L’activité de la Société des Nations dans le domaine intellectuel, 10–1.
20 J.-A. PEMBERTON
towards the Intellectual Cooperation that was manifested by the other

members of the British Empire in the assembly.75 Bonnet further observed
in relation to the Indian stance that while ‘one cannot say that the delega-
tion of this great country had total freedom of decision’ at the time of the
opening of the ‘world Parliament,’ one can say that ‘on the need for rap-
prochement and mutual comprehension between the old cultures of the
West and Asia, she never made any concession.’76
Other members of the British Empire routinely objected to the LON’s
involvement in Intellectual Cooperation on the grounds of cost and util-
ity, although these may not have been the only reasons for the Anglo-
Saxon mistrust of Intellectual Cooperation: Renoliet suggests that the
Anglo-Saxon members of the LON did not want to supply France with a
vehicle for promoting its cultural interests.77 F. R. Cowell, a one-time
member of the British Foreign Office who participated in the creation of
UNESCO, offers a somewhat contrasting view, suggesting that the notion
that the ‘whole thing [Intellectual Cooperation] was just another cunning
French cultural propaganda device’ was in fact a pretext which Britain
concocted in order to ‘cover its apparent meanness.’78 Be that as it may, a
‘fear of too much French influence’ was certainly a prominent feature of
the forceful Australian objections to the French government’s offer to
found and finance an institute to be based in Paris that would serve,
alongside a section of the LON Secretariat, as the ICIC OIC’s executive
arm: the IIIC.79 In any case, what one can say is that the Anglo-Saxon
members of the LON were consistent in opposing and deriding intellec-
tual cooperation, a stance which caused Lord Arthur Balfour to observe
that the Anglo-Saxon delegations ‘never voted together except to oppose
intellectual co-operation.’80
75
Bonnet, ‘La Société des Nations et la Coopération Intellectuelle,’ 200. At the assembly
in 1922, the French delegation moved to reverse a cut to the ICIC’s annual budget made by
the Fourth Committee, and the French motion was ‘supported in an admirable speech by the
Jam Sahib of Nawanagar,’ a delegate of India. The French motion, which was, in the event,
successful, was opposed during the vote by Australia, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand
and South Africa. See H. Wilson Harris, Geneva 1922: Being an Account of the Third Assembly
of the League of Nations (London: League of Nations Union, 1923), 53.
76
Bonnet, ‘La Société des Nations et la Coopération Intellectuelle,’ 200.
77
78
Cowell ‘Planning The Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’
219.
79
Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 31. See also Bonnet, Intellectual
Co-operation in World Organization, 9.
80
Cowell ‘Planning The Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’
219.
The International Committee on Intellectual

Cooperation
On May 15, 1922, the council appointed eleven of the proposed twelve
members of the ICIC, a twelfth appointment (that of an American) being
made a few days later.81 Those appointed were Devendra Nath Bannerjea,
professor of political economy at the University of Calcutta; Henri
Bergson, honorary professor at the Collège de France, member of the
French Academy and member of the Academy of Moral and Political
Sciences; Kristine Bonnevie, professor of zoology at the University of
Christiana and delegate of Norway to the LON; Aloysio de Castro, direc-
tor of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Rio de Janeiro; Marie
Curie-Sklodowska, professor of physics at the University of Paris, honor-
ary professor at the University of Warsaw, member of the Academy of
Medicine of Paris, member of the Scientific Society of Warsaw and mem-
ber of the Polish Academy; Jules Destrée, former Belgian minister of sci-
ence and arts and member of the Belgian Academy of French Language
and Literature; Albert Einstein, professor of physics at the Universities of
Leyden and Berlin, member of the Royal Academy of Amsterdam, mem-
ber of the Royal Society in London and member of the Academy of
Sciences of Berlin; George E. Hale, director of Mount Wilson Observatory,
member of the executive committee of the International Council of
Research, honorary president of the National Research Council of the
United States, foreign associate of the Institute of France and foreign
member of the Royal Society in London; Gilbert Murray, professor of
Greek philology at the University of Oxford and member of the Council
of the British Academy; Gonzague de Reynold, professor of French litera-
ture at the University of Bern; Francesco Ruffini, professor of ecclesiastical
law at the University of Turin, former minister of public education, presi-
dent of the International Union of Associations for the League and vice-
president of the Royal Academy of Turin; and Leonardo Torres y Quevedo,
director of the Electro-Mechanical Laboratory at Madrid, member of the
Real Academia de Ciencias, member of the Junta para Ampliación de
Estudios, member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and inspector general
of the Engineering Corps of Roads and Bridges.82
81
Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 25. See also Kolasa,
International Intellectual Co-operation, 21 and Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 26.
82
Pham, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 25–6. See also Kolasa,
International Intellectual Co-operation, 21, 168. Robert A. Millikan, director of the Norman
22 J.-A. PEMBERTON
According to Frank P. Walters, an advisor to Drummond who later

became his chef de cabinet, Drummond had ‘from the very first … made
up his mind to form his Secretariat as a strictly international body.’83 This
point is noteworthy because it was on the urging of the secretariat that it
was the council rather than member states that nominated members of the
ICIC and that those appointed were selected on the basis of their high
intellectual stature and irrespective of their citizenship. Both the method
of and the basis for the appointments to the ICIC reflected the secretari-
at’s view that the members of the ICIC should represent their respective
fields of learning and not the states of which they were citizens.84
Importantly, the secretariat’s approach as adopted by the council allowed
for the appointment of intellectuals to the ICIC who were nationals of
countries that were not members of the LON, thus imparting to it a sem-
blance of universalism. The same approach was also intended to ensure
that the ICIC would be genuinely internationalist in outlook, such that it
would not be ‘paralysed by political divisions.’85 Yet the selection process
was not without its biases, given that ‘almost all the nationalities compos-
ing the Council [were] represented.’86
Japan was the only permanent member of the council not represented
on the ICIC at the moment of its creation. However, Nitobe quickly
found himself appointed to the newly created role of director of the
Intellectual Cooperation Section, a position in the secretariat which he
combined his role as under-secretary-general.87 It was because of Nitobe’s
new role that Japan did not at first press for Japanese representation on the
ICIC.88 The special case of Japan aside, the overwhelmingly European
Bridge Laboratory for Physics at the California Institute of Technology, vice-president of the
National Research Council of the United States and an exchange professor in Belgium, was
appointed as a substitute for George E. Hale as the latter could not attend all the meetings.
83
F. P. Walters, A History of the League of Nations (London: Oxford University Press, 1952),
75. On Frank P. Walters’s role, see Peter van den Dungen, ‘Sir Eric Drummond: the First
International Civil Servant,’ United Nations Library (Geneva), League of Nations Archives,
The League of Nations 1929–1946: Organization and Accomplishments; a retrospective of the first
organization for the establishment of world peace (New York: United Nations, 1996), 31.
84
Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 25–6 and Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 177.
85
86
Ibid., 26.
87
Felix Morley, The Society of Nations (New York: Brookings Institution, 1931), 278n.
88
The issue of representation was raised by the Romanian, Serbo-Croat and Czech group
and the Spanish-speaking American group at the assembly in 1923. At the same assembly,
Chu Chao-Hsin, speaking on behalf of the Asiatic group, lamented the fact that ‘the intel-
character of the committee very quickly gave rise to demands, aired both
within the assembly and the council, for the ICIC to be enlarged so as to
accommodate more representatives of intellectual life in Latin America
and Asia as well as representatives of intellectual life in those smaller
European nations who were not represented among the initial twelve
appointments.89
In June 1924, in the course of the council meeting which saw a place
created anew for Einstein as discussed below, a representative of Uruguay
demanded that a seat be attributed to Spanish-speaking American peoples.
In response to this, the ICIC was enlarged to include an Argentinian:
Léopoldo Lugones.90 In 1926, on the retirement of Nitobe from the sec-
retariat, the council acceded to the Japanese government’s request that it
appoint the physicist Tanakadate Aikitsu to the ICIC, which, as a result,
now numbered fifteen.91 In 1930, following the appointment of Wu
Zhihui (Wu Shi-Fee), officially described by the ICIC as a member of the
Faculty of Beiyang (Peiyang) University and of Nanyang College,
Shanghai, and Nicolae Titulescu, the Romanian minister of foreign affairs
and a professor of law at the University of Bucharest, the number of ICIC
members reached seventeen.92
lectual movement of the Far East was not adequately represented.’ As a consequence of the
demands of these groups as well as by other countries, the assembly resolved that member-
ship of the Committee should immediately be increased to sixteen. Northedge, International
Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 310. Julien Luchaire stated that he
had ‘only ever received from … [Nitobe, Inazō] … encouragement.’ Luchaire added he
‘could not say as much’ of Drummond nor of Drummond’s deputy Joseph Avenol, suggest-
ing that the latter was even less encouraging than the former. Luchaire, Confessions d’un
Français moyen, 85.
89
Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 48n,
310–3.
90
Pham, La Coopération Intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations, 78. This demand was
made at the council meeting of June 16, 1923. See also Kolasa, International Intellectual
Co-operation, 167. Lugones was the director of the Library of Professors and a former
inspector-general of education.
91
Northedge, International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations,
310. For Tanakadate Aikitsu, see Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 167–8.
92
Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 168. For a more accurate and detailed
description of the background of Wu Zhihui, see Françoise Kreissler, ‘China-Europe:
Transcontinental “Intellectual Cooperation” during the Interwar Period,’ in Peng Hsiao-yen
and Isabelle Rabut, eds., Modern China and the West: Translation and Cultural Meditation
(Leiden: Brill, 2014), 17–8. On the Japanese government’s request, see Northedge,
International Intellectual Co-operation Within the League of Nations, 310.
24 J.-A. PEMBERTON
Finally in regard to the make-up of the ICIC, the strength of French

influence needs to be underlined, France being the only country to have
two nationals (namely, Bergson and the Franco-Polish Curie-Sklodowska)
on the committee. Elements in the French government also counted on
receiving the support when it came to the promotion of French interests
(such as assisting in the French campaign to prevent Esperanto from
becoming an official language of the LON), from those members of the
committee who, according to Renoliet, had French ‘sympathies,’ notably
the Swiss national Reynold.93
France’s influence raises the question as to why appointing a German
member was even considered, especially given that at the time, as
Siegfried Grundmann points out, German ‘science was being systemati-
cally boycotted by international organizations under the guiding influ-
ence of France.’94 The simple explanation is that those involved in
establishing the ICIC wanted to revive ‘fruitful cooperation among
scholars from all countries,’ and this meant bringing to an end the boy-
cott of German science: despite the formal position that the members
of the committee acted only in their individual capacity, many partisans
of intellectual cooperation wanted a ‘representative of Germany and
German Science’ to sit on the committee.95 Given the hostility that
many in France still harboured towards Germany, the appointment of a
German was likely to prove extremely difficult and this is precisely why
Einstein was selected: his extraordinary scientific achievements and his
well-known pacifism meant that even the French government, it having
earlier sought to exclude nationals of the defeated countries from the
ICIC, could not resist his appointment.96
Einstein was first alerted to his possible appointment to the committee
when visiting France in March and April 1922 on the invitation of his
friend and fellow physicist, Paul Langevin, on behalf of the Collège de
93
Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 26–7.
94
Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 178. Katharina Rietzler notes that Germany’s
involvement in international scholarly collaboration was ‘effectively curtailed between 1919
and 1926 through an organized boycott of Germany by the national scientific academies of
the former Allied and neutral countries.’ Katharina Rietzler, ‘Philanthropy, Peace Research,
and Revisionist Politics: Rockefeller and Carnegie Support for the Study of International
Relations in Weimar Germany,’ supplement, GHI Bulletin, no. 5 (2008): 61–79, 65.
95
Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 178–9.
96
Ibid., 178; Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 25–6 and Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden, eds.,
Einstein on Peace (New York: Schocken Books, 1960), 58–9.
France. The visit was seen as significant in terms of improving Franco-

German relations in general and German and French scholars in particular.
Although initially reluctant, Einstein in the end accepted the invitation at
the urging of his friend Walther Rathenau, the German foreign minister.97
On April 6, a week and a half after arriving at the French border where he
was met by Langevin, Einstein participated in a debate with Bergson at the
Société de Philosophie in Paris concerning philosophical and physical
interpretations of time, a debate which many observers deemed Einstein
to have won.98 Bergson, who would be elected president of the committee
on August 5 that year, highly esteemed Einstein’s intellect, and he was not
going to let slip the opportunity of encouraging Einstein to join the ICIC,
especially given the positive public response in France to Einstein’s tour.99
The secretary-general promptly issued an invitation to Einstein to join
the ICIC, an invitation to which Einstein acceded on May 30. On July 4,
however, Einstein, who had been badly shaken by the assassination of
Rathenau on June 24, abruptly reneged on his acceptance. In a note
accompanying a letter sent to Pierre Comert, the head of the Information
Section of the secretariat, the ICIC’s secretary until the autumn of that
year and someone with whom Einstein was acquainted, he offered the fol-
lowing explanation:
The situation here is such that a Jew would do well to exercise restraint as
regards his participation in political affairs. In addition, I must say that I
have no desire to represent people who certainly would not choose me as
their representative, and with whom I find myself in disagreement on the
questions to be dealt with.100
97
Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 130. See also Jimena Canales, ‘Einstein, Bergson,
and the Experiment that Failed: Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations’ MLN.
120, no. 5 (2005): 1168–91, 1175.
98
Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 130. Einstein concluded the debate with the follow-
ing statement: ‘There is thus not a time of the philosophers; there is only a psychological
time different from the time of the physicist.’ See ‘Discussion avec Einstein,’ in Henri
Bergson, Mélanges (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1972), 1340–437.
99
Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 179.
100
Pierre Comert, 1922, quoted in Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace, 59. See
also Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 180; Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 2; and David
E. Rowe and Robert J. Schulmann, Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public
Stands on Nationalism, Zionism, War, Peace, and the Bomb (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2007), 189, 192.
26 J.-A. PEMBERTON
Einstein’s retraction of his acceptance greatly disappointed those who

had campaigned on his behalf. Bergson, Curie-Sklodowska, Nitobe and
Murray all made efforts to ensure that Einstein reversed his decision. Such
was the importance attached to Einstein’s membership by LON officials
that Comert was sent to Berlin in the hope of persuading Einstein to
reconsider.101 On July 29, after having discussed the matter at length with
Comert over the previous two days, Einstein wrote to the secretary-
general, stating that although he would not be able to attend the first
meeting of the ICIC, which was scheduled to take place in Geneva between
August 1 and 5, as there were pressing matters to which he had to attend
before his forthcoming scientific mission to Japan, upon his return his
participation in the committee would be ‘more zealous.’102
According to a report submitted by the German consul in Geneva to
the German Foreign Office which was based on a discussion with the
Polish historian Oskar de Halecki, a member of the secretariat who had
been elected the ICIC’s new secretary at the Geneva meeting, the mem-
bers of the ICIC had expressed doubts about the reason Einstein had
given for this absence.103 They had asked themselves whether the real
reason for his non-attendance concerned the anti-League sentiment cur-
rent in Germany or whether the pronounced anti-Semitic feeling there
had caused Einstein to feel that ‘as a Jew he had to be particularly careful
and therefore could not appear as a representative of German science.’
The German consul noted in his report that Einstein’s colleagues were
especially dismayed by his absence because they felt that his ‘presence
would have most brilliantly revealed the international character of
the event.’104
101
Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (London: Hodder and Staunton, 1996),
340 and Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace, 59.
102
Albert Einstein, 1922, quoted in Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times, 341. Clark is
quoting from a letter that Comert subsequently wrote to Einstein which concludes with an
account of Einstein’s letter to the secretary-general retracting his resignation.
103
Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 182. See also Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times
(London: Hodder and Staunton, 1996), 341. Einstein did not in fact sail to Japan until
October. See further ‘Commission Internationale de Coopération Intellectuelle’ in Bergson,
Mélanges, 1352–54. In addition to the members of the ICIC and Halecki, the first meeting
of the ICIC was attended by Nitobe, Luchaire (who accompanied Bergson) and William
Martin, an American who served as technical advisor at the ILO.
104
German Consulate in Geneva, 1922, quoted in Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers,
182–3.
Einstein would cause his ICIC colleagues further dismay upon his
return from Japan. On March 21, 1923, he resigned from the ICIC once
more after having been ‘swept up … in the German outrage over the arbi-
trary exercise of foreign power’ in the form of the French and Belgian
occupation of the Ruhr on January 11 of that year.105 The French and
Belgian action reinforced Einstein’s view that the LON, as he wrote to
Curie-Sklodowska, despite its ‘thin veneer of objectivity’ served as a ‘will-
ing instrument of power politics.’106
Einstein expressed much the same view of the LON in the letter of
resignation that he sent to Comert, stating that as a committed pacifist he
did not ‘consider it right’ to be associated with such an institution.107 It is
true that Einstein had serious misgivings about the LON which he had
come to view as a ‘hypocritical’ enterprise despite its ‘fine name.’108
However, Grundmann suggests that Einstein’s ‘most immediate, although
unexpressed reason’ for his resignation was neither the Ruhr occupation
nor his disillusionment with the LON.109 According to Grundmann, what
was most likely at the forefront of Einstein’s mind concerned the senti-
ment he had expressed in his note to Comert in the previous year: he had
no wish to represent people who most certainly have not chosen him to be
their representative and with whose views he largely disagreed.110
On this occasion Einstein’s behaviour dismayed and infuriated many of
those associated with the ICIC, an important reason being that some had
hoped that through Einstein’s membership the ICIC could serve as a
means to counter the boycott of German science.111 In fact, Murray com-
plained to Einstein that ‘his decision weakened the committee and
destroyed the possibility of issuing a collective statement by the committee
members against the French policy.’112 As Grundmann points out,
105
Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 183–4. See also Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein
on Peace, 61.
106
Rowe and Schulmann, Einstein on Politics, 194. See also Nathan and Norden, eds.,
Einstein on Peace, 62.
107
108
Albert Einstein quoted ibid., 184.
109
Albert Einstein to Pierre Comert, 4 July 1922, quoted in Grundmann The Einstein
Dossiers, 184.
110
111
Grundmann writes that Comert felt ‘rebuffed and offended’ and that Marie Curie-
Sklodowska, Murray and many others ‘felt at least as snubbed.’ Ibid., 184.
112
Ibid. Jimena Canales quotes Murray as advising Einstein in July 1922 that ‘this
Committee, like all the organizations of the League of Nations, is in danger of having the
28 J.-A. PEMBERTON
Murray’s complaint shows that the ICIC was not an ‘obedient instrument
of French cultural imperialism’ despite French interests being overrepre-
sented on it.113
Within the framework of the ICIC, the question of intellectual rela-
tions with Germany was a particular source of tension between France and
Britain in the respective shapes of Bergson and Murray, the latter then
being the committee’s vice-president. Bergson resisted the normalisation
of such relations, considering that it was his obligation as a Frenchman, to
pay heed to French opinion. Nor did Bergson think it was in the interest
of the ICIC to ignore such opinion.114 The tension produced by Bergson’s
attitude surfaced when he nominated the Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon
Lorentz as a replacement for Einstein on April 23, 1923.115 In a telegram
sent to Nitobe, Bergson excitedly reported that the new appointment was
a ‘world celebrity like Einstein,’ a status Bergson considered essential to
the ‘prestige and future’ of the ICIC.116 Murray, however, was not so
enthused, seeing the appointment as a reflection of the ‘hidden a nti-German
spirit’ present among certain members of the ICIC and as evidence that
this body was in some degree attempting to boycott Germany.117
On March 5 of the following year, against the background of British
calls for Germany to be reintegrated into the community of nations and at
a time when France was diplomatically isolated and weakened due to its
currency crisis, The Times published an extremely harsh letter penned by
Murray in which he reproached the ICIC for not including a German
among its members.118 Murray’s letter was noteworthy for bearing the
address of 15 Grosvenor Crescent, S. W. 1: the address of the British
League of Nations Union (LNU). More importantly, it was notable for
lamenting the absence of German representation on the committee rather
Latin element overrepresented.’ Canales, ‘Einstein, Bergson, and the Experiment that
Failed,’ 1180.
113
114
Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 41. See also Daniel Laqua, ‘Transnational intellectual coop-
eration, the League of Nations, and the problem of order,’ Journal of Global History 6, no.
2 (2011): 223–47, 235.
115
116
Henri Bergson, 1923, quoted ibid., 185.
117
Rose Marie Mossé-Bastide, Bergson éducateur (Paris: Presses universitaires de France,
1955), 123. See also Kolasa, International Intellectual Co-operation, 38–9.
118
Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 41–3 and Gilbert Murray, letter to the editor, The Times,
March 5, 1924.
than simply the absence of Einstein.119 In this regard, Murray argued

as follows:
The League of Nations Committee of Intellectual Cooperation has issued

an appeal for funds for the relief of the intellectual classes in various coun-
tries in Europe, and I see from the Press that very serious criticism has been
aroused by the fact that there is still no German member on the committee,
and that Germany is not included among the countries reported upon or
those to which it is proposed to give relief …. [A]s a member of the
Committee of Intellectual Cooperation, I feel bound to repeat what I have
said more than once both on the committee and at meetings of the
Assembly—that I consider the complete failure of the committee to enter
into relations with the intellectual classes in Germany, to whatever cause it
may be due, not only severely injures the committee’s usefulness and preju-
dices its reputation and good faith, but makes a great part of its work posi-
tively harmful.
The … [ICIC] … was intended to perform a great work of healing in
Europe by ‘appealing to those feelings of solidarity which should unite intel-
lectual workers all over the world.’ It started with a most distinguished
chairman and personnel and with magnificent prospects. But as things have
turned out, its action has tended to embitterment rather than to healing.
However excellent the intentions which animate individual members of the
committee, the actual result of their labours is to build up throughout the
rest of Europe while the German universities are down and out, a closely
knit intellectual association from which German science, literature, and
thought are rigidly excluded. And this is emphatically not the object with
which the … [ICIC] … was formed. If it is still impossible for Frenchmen,
Belgians, and Germans to work together, even in the dispassionate realm of
the intellect this means that ‘intellectual cooperation’ is not a present pos-
sible. The ‘feelings of solidarity among intellectual workers’ does not exist.
That being so, I think the Council of the League might well consider the
desirability of suspending the operations of the … [ICIC] … until times
change. As things now are, the … [ICIC] … tends to prevent European
cooperation, not to promote it.120
119
Mossé-Bastide, Bergson éducateur, 123. See also Kolasa, International Intellectual
Co-operation, 38–9. In 1957, Murray recalled the following: ‘I was naturally eager to get
Doctor Einstein made a member of the Committee on Intellectual Co-operation, partly
because he would, in a sense, count as a German, and partly for his eminence.’ See Nathan
and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace, 58.
120
Murray, letter to the editor, The Times, March 5, 1924.
30 J.-A. PEMBERTON
Unsurprisingly, Murray’s harsh critique raised the ire of Bergson, who

initially wished to respond vigorously to the accusations brought against
the commission but who, it would appear, was persuaded by certain of his
colleagues not to so respond ‘for fear of creating a dangerous tension in
the Commission’ and for exacerbating the ill-feeling caused by the percep-
tion that it was as an instrument of French cultural politics.121 Members of
the secretariat, Drummond among them, were also disapproving of
Murray’s action; however, there was also a concern at that level that con-
tinuing anti-German sentiment might see the Anglo-Saxons, namely, the
British and the Americans, desert the ICIC. People well understood that
without Anglo-Saxon involvement, the ICIC would be a less representa-
tive and less prestigious body, thereby making it a less attractive proposi-
tion to potential donors.122 Even in French official circles there was a
growing feeling that the restoration of relations with Germany was inevi-
table and that it would be politic, as Luchaire urged, for the ICIC to
demonstrate that it was ‘capable of good will in the face of Germany.’123
Thus, Renoliet observes, ‘the policy of conciliation carried out by
[Ḗdouard] Herriot from the summer of 1924 … [was] … already at work
in the domain of intellectual cooperation.’124
In a confidential letter addressed to Einstein and dated May 16, Murray
began by pointing to the criticisms that he and others had sometimes
made of the ICIC ‘on the grounds of its one-sidedness,’ adding that ‘mat-
ters had now reached the point,’ where if Einstein were to alter his stance
in relation to the committee, ‘they would unanimously welcome your
presence.’ Having noted that Einstein had resigned following the occupa-
tion of the Ruhr and the consequent deterioration in Franco-German rela-
tions, Murray stated that his return to the committee would be the
‘beginning of that rapprochement’ between France and Germany ‘to which
we all look forward.’125 Murray finished the letter by stating that if Einstein
could assure him that he would accept an invitation from the council to
121
Mossé-Bastide, Bergson éducateur, 123–4 and Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 41–2.
122
Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 41. See also Laqua, ‘Transnational intellectual cooperation,
the League of Nations, and the problem of order,’ 235–6. Daniel Laqua records that while
certain elements in the secretariat were critical of Murray’s public intervention, they were
also critical of Bergson’s role.
123
124
Ibid., 43.
125
Murray to Einstein, 16 May 1924, in Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace,
65–6.
return to the committee, he was certain that such an invitation would be

issued.126 On May 30, Einstein responded to Murray’s entreaty, declaring
in his letter of response that he would be ‘grateful’ to accept a seat on the
committee. Despite the LON’s many failures, Einstein felt that it provided
the best avenue for achieving international rapprochement and that he
should do his utmost to ensure that the ‘spirit of European unity, so
strongly manifest in the French people, be allowed to bear fruit.’127 In a
letter dated June 6, after having noted the pleasure elicited in him by
Einstein’s response, Murray told Einstein that all the information to which
he was privy seemed to indicate that there was going to be a ‘real and
decided change in the direction of French policy, especially in matters con-
nected with League.’128
On June 16, at the fourth meeting of its twenty-ninth session, the
British representative Lord Parmoor informed the council of Einstein’s
letter to Murray, following which Bourgeois called for it to be read out.129
Bourgeois then told the council he had discussed the question of Einstein’s
return to the ICIC with Bergson and that Bergson had stated that ‘he
could see nothing but advantage’ in Einstein resuming his seat.130 At this
point of the proceedings, the council decided to invite Einstein to ‘sit on
the committee as representative of German science,’ an invitation accepted
by Einstein on June 25.131
Einstein thus attended the fourth meeting of the ICIC which took
place between July 25 and 29. During its opening session, Bergson
declared that the ICIC was ‘pleased and proud’ to have among its mem-
bers a person of such world-wide renown as Einstein, declaring that
Einstein’s work was the fruit of ‘one of the most powerful efforts that man
has ever made to extend the limits of human thought’ and adding that he
hoped that Einstein’s presence on the ICIC would attract those interested
126
Ibid., 66.
127
Einstein to Murray, 30 May 1924, in Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace,
66–7. Einstein is reported to have said that the appointment of his friend Hendrik Antoon
Lorentz, a man ‘he so honored and whose motives and impulses he knew to be of the purest
and the highest, [had] resolved any doubts that he might have had as to the Committee.’ See
Waldo G. Leland, ‘Some Aspects of Intellectual Co-operation Since the World War,’ Advocate
of Peace Through Justice 92 no. 2 (1930):112–23, 114.
128
Murray to Einstein. 6 June 1924, in Nathan and Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace, 67.
129
LON, OJ, no. 7 (1924), 914.
130
Ibid.
131
Ibid.
32 J.-A. PEMBERTON
in his ‘transcendental speculations’ to the ideal of the LON.132 Despite this

promising beginning, Einstein soon found the work involved in being a
member of the ICIC frustrating. He complained that it was a drain on his
other activities, most particularly his scientific research. In light of this, on
March 5, 1927, Einstein nominated a proxy for himself on the ICIC:
Hugo Andres Krüss, the managing director of the Prussian State Library.133
Krüss was more than willing to assist in a role that other members of
German academic institutions had shunned either because of patriotic sen-
timent or because of their sensitivity to German public opinion regarding
the LON.134 However, with the German Foreign Office manoeuvring to
gain entry to the LON in 1925 and then with Germany actually entering
it on September 10, 1926, the public hostility in Germany towards the
LON had begun to dissipate. Krüss’s willingness to participate in the
ICIC, Grundmann suggests, reflected an emerging sense that with
Germany’s entry into the LON, a new chapter in German history had
commenced.135 Grundmann also observes that like the German Foreign
Office, Krüss was ‘much more flexible and far-sighted than academic
institutions’ in regard to what posture to adopt in relation to the LON
and its various institutions. In addition, he points out that Krüss, who had
already served as Einstein’s proxy on the ICIC’s Bibliographic Sub-
Committee in 1926, had in fact coveted Einstein’s position on the ICIC
for some years.136
In June 1924, a date which coincided with Einstein’s readmission to
the ICIC, Krüss travelled to Geneva, where, with the assistance of the
German consulate, he was able to speak with Nitobe and the Romanian
George Oprescu, the latter being the secretary of the ICIC at the time.
Krüss’s visit was ostensibly in order to explore the LON’s activities in the
cultural and academic fields. It was also ostensibly, as the consulate
emphasised to Nitobe and Oprescu, of a private nature. Nonetheless,
Krüss, then an employee of the Ministry of Culture, had the full support
of the Foreign Office in undertaking this mission. In fact, just before his
132
‘Commission Internationale de Coopération Intellectuelle,’ in Bergson, Mélanges,
1455.
133
Grundmann, The Einstein Dossiers, 192, 194–5. Krüss was not Einstein’s first choice as
proxy on the ICIC. See also Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 93. Between 1926 and 1930,
Einstein attended only three meetings of the committee.
134
135
136
Ibid.
departure, Krüss was asked by one of its officials to seek to ‘uncover

“underground ties”’ between the ICIC and the Brussels-based
International Research Council, the latter being an organisation involved
in the boycott of German science.137
Aside from his ongoing cultivation of key figures associated with the
ICIC, the most telling evidence of Krüss’s ambition is the fact that on
February 6, 1925, while he was still serving at the Ministry of Culture,
Krüss stated the following at a meeting at the Foreign Office: that
Einstein ‘who himself constantly emphasizes his supranationality, could
not be a ‘valid representative’ of Germany at the ICIC of the LON.’ At
the same meeting, Krüss stressed the importance of finding suitable per-
sons for such positions, warning that ‘[a]bstention on this issue would
be worse, because the other side would never have difficulty finding will-
ing outsiders as representatives of Germany, who would then lack the
crucial characteristics they ought to have in guarding the interests of
German science.’138 There was unintended irony in Krüss’s observations.
Leaving aside his breathtaking fame, it was because of Einstein’s status
as an outsider in Germany, a status which in part derived from his supra-
nationalism and pacifism, that he had been acceptable to the other side.
Indeed, Bergson informed Nitobe at the time of Einstein’s initial
appointment that he was ‘the only German whom the French could pos-
sibly accept.’139
Henri Bergson and Intellectual Cooperation

Bergson was a committed French patriot, and his patriotism was forcefully
on display in a presidential speech delivered at the annual public meeting
on December 12, 1914, in which he sought to explain the ‘inner meaning’
of the war (la signification de la guerre).140 Essentially, what Bergson
137
Ibid., 182, 196–7. The private nature of the meeting was stressed in order to ‘prevent
that the presence of Mr. Krüss be correlated with the readmission’ of Einstein to the ICIC
and ‘be taken as a sign of an official rapprochement.’ On the International Research Council
and the boycott on German science, see Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée, 42.
138
Minutes of the meeting at the Foreign Office, 1925, quoted in Grundmann, The
Einstein Dossiers, 198.
139
140
Henri Bergson, ‘Life and Matter at War,’ The Hibbert Journal 13, no. 3 (1915):
465–75, 465 and Henri Bergson, ‘Discours en séance publique de l’Académie des Sciences
Morales et Politiques,’ in Bergson, Mélanges, 1107–8.
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is true, had put on a white and cobwebby kind of blouse, which together with
her short walking skirt and the innocent droop of her fair hair about her little
ears made her look at the most eighteen, and Mrs. Menzies-Legh had tricked
herself out in white too, producing indeed for our admiration a white skirt as
well as a white blouse, and achieving at the most by these efforts an air of
(no doubt spurious) cleanliness; but the others were still all spattered and
disfigured by the muddy accumulations of the past day.
Though they stopped dancing as I came in I had time to receive a
photograph on my mind’s eye of the various members of our party: of
Jellaby, loose-collared and wispy-haired, gyrating with poor Frau von
Eckthum, of Edelgard, flushed with childish enjoyment, in the grip of a boy
who might very well have been her own if I had married her a few years
sooner and if it were conceivable that I could ever have produced anything
so undeveloped and half-grown, and of, if you please, Menzies-Legh in all
his elderliness, dancing with an object the short voluminousness of whose
clothing proclaimed a condition of unripeness even greater than that of the
two fledglings—dancing, in a word, with a child.
That he should dance at all was, you will agree, sufficiently unworthy but
at least if he must make himself publicly foolish he might have done it with
some one more suited to his years, some one of the age of the lady, for
instance—singularly unlike one’s idea of a ghost—standing at the upper end
of the room playing the violin that had half an hour previously been so
incomprehensible to me.
On seeing me enter he stopped dead, and his face resumed the familiar
look of lowering gloom. The other couples followed his example, and the
violin, after a brief hesitation, whined away into passivity.
“Capital,” said I heartily to Menzies-Legh, who happened to have been in
the act of dancing past the door I came in by. “Capital. Enjoy yourself, my
friend. You are doing admirably well for what you told me is a weed. In a
German ball-room you would, I assure you, create an immense sensation, for
it is not the custom there for gentlemen over thirty—which,” I amended,
bowing, “I may be entirely wrong in presuming that you are—for gentlemen
over thirty——”
But he interrupted me to remark with the intelligence that characterized
him (after all, what ailed the man was, I believe, principally stupidity) that
this was not a German ball-room.
“Ah,” said I, “you are right there, my friend. That indeed is what you
English call a different pair of shoes. If it were, do you know where the
gentlemen over thirty would be?”
He spoiled the neat answer I had all ready of “Not there” by, instead of
seeking information, observing with his customary boorishness, “Confound
the gentlemen over thirty,” and walking his long-stockinged partner away.
“Otto,” whispered my wife, hurrying up, “you must come and be
introduced to the people who are kindly letting us dance here.”
“Not unless they are of decent birth,” I said firmly.
“Whether they are or not you must come,” said she. “The lady who is
playing is——”
“I know, I know, she is a ghost,” said I, unable to forbear smiling at my
own jest; and I think my hearers will agree that a man who can make fun of
himself may certainly be said to be at least fairly equipped with a sense of
humour.
Edelgard stared. “She is the pastor’s wife,” she said. “It is her party. It is
so kind of her to let us in. You must come and be introduced.”
“She is a ghost,” I persisted, greatly diverted by the notion, for I felt a
reaction of cheerfulness, and never was a lady more substantial than the one
with the violin; “she is a ghost, and a highly unattractive specimen of the
sect. Dear wife, only ghosts should be introduced to other ghosts. I am flesh
and blood, and will therefore go instead and release the little Eckthum from
the flesh and blood persistencies of Jellaby.”
“But Otto, you must come,” said Edelgard, laying her hand on my arm as
I prepared to move in the direction of the charming victim; “you can’t be
rude. She is your hostess——”
“She is my ghostess,” said I, very divertingly I thought; so divertingly
that I was seized by a barely controllable desire to indulge in open mirth.
Edelgard, however, with the blank incomprehension of the droll so often
to be observed in women, did not so much as smile.
“Otto,” said she, “you absolutely must——”
“Must, dear wife,” said I with returning gravity, “is a word no woman of
tact ever lets her husband hear. I see no must why I, being who I am, should
request an introduction to a Frau Pastor. I would not in Storchwerder. Still
less will I at Frog’s Hole Farm.”
“But you are her guest——”
“I am not. I came.”
“But it is so nice of her to allow you to come.”
“It is not niceness. She is delighted at the honour.”
“But Otto, you simply can’t——”
I was about to move off definitely to the corner where Frau von Eckthum
sat helpless in the talons of Jellaby when who should enter the door just in
front of which Edelgard was wrangling but the creature I had last parted
from on unfriendly terms in the church a few hours before.
Attired this time from chin to boots in a long and narrow buttoned-down
black garment suggestive of that of the Pope’s priests, with a gold cross
dangling on his chest, his eye immediately caught mine and the genial smile
of the party-giver with which he had come in died away. Evidently he had
been there earlier, for Edelgard as though she were well acquainted with him
darted forward (where, alas, remained the dignity of the well-born?) and
very officiously introduced me to him. Me to him, observe.
“Let me,” said my wife, “introduce my husband, Baron Ottringel.”
And she did.
It was of course the pastor who ought to have been introduced to me on
such neutral ground as an impromptu ball-room, but Edelgard had, as the
caravan tour lengthened, acquired the habit of using the presence of a third
person in order to do as she chose, with no reference whatever to my known
wishes. This is a habit specially annoying to a man of my disposition,
peppery perhaps, but essentially bon enfant, who likes to get his cautions and
reprimands over and done with and forgotten, rather than be forced to allow
them to accumulate and brood over them indefinitely.
Rendered helpless by my own good breeding—a quality which leads to
many a discomfort in life—I was accordingly introduced for all the world as
though I were the inferior, and could only show my sensibility of the fact by
a conspicuous stiffening.
“Otto thinks it is so very kind of you to let us come in,” said Edelgard, all
smiles and with an augmentation of officiousness and defiance of me that
was incredible.
“I am glad you were able to,” replied the pastor looking at me, politeness
in his voice and chill in his eye. It was plain the creature was still angry
because, in church, I would not pray.
“You are very good,” said I, bowing with at least an equal chill.
“Otto wishes,” continued the shameless Edelgard, reckless of the private
hours with me ahead, “to be introduced to your—to Mrs.—Mrs.——”
“Raggett,” supplied the pastor.
And I would certainly have been dragged up then and there to the round
red ghost at the top of the room while Edelgard, no doubt, triumphed in the
background, if it had not itself come to the rescue by striking up another tune
on its fiddle.
“Presently,” said the pastor, now become crystallized for me into Raggett.
“Presently. Then with pleasure.”
And his glassy eye, fixed on mine, had little of pleasure in it.
At this point Edelgard danced away with Jellaby from under my very
nose. I made an instinctive movement toward the slender figure alone in the
corner, but even as I moved a half-grown boy secured her and hurried her off
among the dancers. Looking round, I saw no one else I could go and talk to;
even Mrs. Menzies-Legh was not available. There was nothing for it,
therefore, but unadulterated Raggett.
“It is nice,” observed this person, watching the dancers—he had a hooky
profile as well as a glassy eye—“to see young people enjoying themselves.”
I bowed, determined to keep within the limits of strict iciness; but as
Jellaby and my wife whirled past I could not forbear adding:
“Especially when the young people are so mature that they are fully
aware of the extent of their own enjoyment.”
“Yes,” said he; without, however, any real responsiveness.
“It is only,” said I, “when a woman is mature, and more than mature, that
she begins to enjoy being young.”
“Yes,” said he; still with no real responsiveness.
“You may possibly,” said I, nettled by this indifference, “regard that as a
paradox.”
“No,” said he.
“It is, however,” said I more loudly, “not one.”
“No,” said he.
“It is on the contrary,” said I still louder, “a rather subtle but undeniable
truth.”
“Yes,” said he; and I then perceived that he was not listening.
I do not know what my hearers feel, but I fancy they feel with me that
when a gentleman of birth and position is amiable enough to talk to a person
of neither it is particularly galling to discover that that person is so unable to
grasp the true aspect of the situation as to neglect even to follow the
conversation. Good breeding (as I have before remarked, a great hinderer)
prevents one’s explaining who one is and emphasizing who the other person
is and doing then and there a sum of subtraction between one’s own value
and his and offering him the result for his closer inspection, so what is one to
do? Stiffen and go dumb, I suppose. Good breeding allows no more. Alas,
there are many and heavy drawbacks to being a gentleman.
Raggett had evidently not been listening to a word I said, for after his last
abstracted “Yes,” he suddenly turned the glassiness of his eye full upon me.
“I did not know,” he said, “when I saw you in church——”
Really the breeding that could go back to the church and what happened
there was too bad for words. My impulse was to stop him by saying “Shall
we dance?” but I was too uncertain of the extent, nay of the existence, of his
powers of seeing fun to venture.
“—that you were not English, or I should not have asked——”
“Sir,” I interrupted, endeavouring to get him at all cost out of the church,
“who, after all, is English?”
He looked surprised. “Well,” said he, “I am.”
“Why, you do not know. You cannot possibly be certain. Go back a
thousand years and, as I lately read in an ingenious but none the less
probably right book, the whole of Europe was filled with your fathers and
mothers. Starting with your two parents and four grandparents and going
backward multiplying as you go, the sixteen great-grandparents are already
almost unmanageable, and a century or two further back you find them
irrepressibly overflowing your little island and spreading themselves across
Europe as thickly and as adhesively as so much jam, until in days a trifle
more remote not a person living of white skin but was your father, unless he
was your mother. Take,” I continued, as he showed signs of wanting to
interrupt—“take any example you choose, you will find the same
inextricable confusion everywhere. And not only physically—spiritually.
Take any example. Anything at random. Take our late lamented Kaiser
Friedrich, who married a daughter of your royal house. It is our custom to
regard and even to call our Kaiser and Kaiserin the Father and Mother of the
nation. The entire nation therefore is, in a spiritual sense, half English. So,
accordingly, am I. So, accordingly, to push the point a step further, you
become their nephew, and therefore a quarter German—a spiritual German
quarter, even as I am a spiritual English half. There is no end to the
confusion. Have you observed, sir, that the moment one begins to think
everything does become confused?”
“Are you not dancing?” said he, fidgetting and looking about him.
I think one is often angry with people because, having assumed on first
acquaintance that they are on one’s own level of intelligence, their speech
and actions presently prove that they are not. This is unjust; but, like most
unjust things, natural. I, however, as a reasonable man do my best to fight
against it, and on Raggett’s asking this question for all response to the
opportunity I gave him of embarking on an interesting discussion, I checked
my natural annoyance by realizing that he was what Menzies-Legh probably
was, merely stupid. Stupidity, my hearers will agree, is of various kinds, and
one kind is want of interest in what is interesting. Of course this particular
stupid was hopelessly ill-bred besides, for what can be more so than meeting
a series of, to put them at their lowest, suggestive remarks by inquiring if
one is not dancing?
“My dear sir,” I said, preserving my own manners at least, “in my country
it is not the custom for married gentlemen over thirty to dance. Perhaps you
were paying me the compliment (often, I must say, paid me before) of
supposing I am not yet that age, but I assure you that I am. Nor do ladies
continue to dance in our country once their early youth is past and their
outlines become—shall we say, bolder? Seats are then provided for them
round the walls, and on them they remain in suitable passivity until the oasis
afforded by the Lancers is reached, when the elder gentlemen pour gallantly
out of the room in which they play cards all the evening and lead them
through its intricacies with the ceremony that satisfies Society’s sense of the
becoming. In this country, on the contrary——”
“Really,” he interrupted, his habit of fidgetting more pronounced than
ever, “you talk English with such a flow and volume that after all you very
well might have joined——”
I now saw that the man was a fanatic, a type of unbalanced person I have
always particularly disliked. Good breeding is little if at all appreciated by
fanatics, and I might have been excused if, at this point, I had flung mine to
the winds. I did not do so, however, but merely interrupted him in my turn
by informing him with cold courteousness that I was a Lutheran.
“And Lutherans,” I added, “do not pray. At least, not audibly, and
certainly never in duets. More,” I continued, putting up my hand as he
opened his mouth to speak, “more. I am a philosopher, and the prayers of a
philosopher cannot be confined within the limits of any formula. Formulas
are for the undeveloped. You tie a child into its chair lest, untied, it should
fall disastrously to the floor. You tie the undeveloped adult to a creed lest,
untied, he should fall goodness really knows where. The grown man, of full
stature in mind as well as body, requires no tying. His whole life is his creed.
Nothing cut and dried, nothing blatant, nothing gaudily apparent to the
outside world, but a subtle saturation, a continual soaking——”
“Excuse me,” said he, “one of those candles is guttering.”
And he hurried across the room with an expedition I would not have
thought possible in a man so gray and glassy to where, in the windows, the
illuminating rows of candles had been placed.
Nor did he come back, I am glad to say, for I found him terribly fatiguing;
and I remained alone, leaning against the wall by the door.
Down at the further end of the room danced my gentle friend, and also
her sister; also all the other members of our party except Menzies-Legh who,
recalled to decency by my good-natured shafts, spent the rest of his time
soberly either helping the pastor pinch off candle-wicks or turning over the
ghost’s music for it.
Desiring to watch Frau von Eckthum more conveniently (for I assure you
it was a pretty sight to see her grace, and how the same tune that made my
wife whirl moved her to nothing more ruffling than an appearance of being
wafted) and also in order to be at hand should Jellaby become too tactless, I
went down to where our party seemed to be gathered in a knot and took up
my position near them against another portion of the wall.
I had hardly done so before they seemed to have melted away to the
upper end.
As they did not come back I presently strolled after them. They then
appeared to melt back again to the bottom.
It was very odd. It was almost like an optical illusion. When I went up,
they went down; when I went down, they went up. I felt at last as one may
feel who plays at see-saw, and began to doubt whether I were really on firm
ground—on terra cotta, as I (amusingly, I thought) called it to Edelgard
when we alighted from the steamer at Queenboro’, endeavouring to restore
her spirits and make her laugh. (Quite in vain I may add, which inclined me
to wonder, I remember, whether the illiteracy which is one of the leading
characteristics of people’s wives had made it impossible for her to
understand even so simple a classical play on words as that. In the train I
realized that it was not illiteracy but the crossing; and I will say for Edelgard
that up to the time the English spirit of criticism got, like a devastating
microbe, hold of her German womanliness, she had invariably laughed when
I chose to jest.)
But gradually the profitless see-sawing began to tire me. The dance
ended, another began, and still my little white-bloused friend had not once
been within reach. I made a determined effort to get to her in the pauses
between the dances in order to offer to break the German rule on her behalf
and give her one dance (for I fancy she was vexed that I did not) and also to
help her out of the clutches of Jellaby, but I might as well have tried to dance
with and help a moonbeam. She was here, she was there, she was
everywhere, except where I happened to be. Once I had almost achieved
success when, just as I was sure of her, she ran up to the ghost resting at that
moment from its labours and embarked in an apparently endless and
absorbing discussion with it, deaf and blind to all beside; and as I had made
up my mind that nothing would induce me to extend my Raggett
acquaintance by causing myself to be introduced to the psychical
phenomenon bearing that name, I was forced to retreat.
Moodily, though. My first hilarity was extinguished. Bon enfant though I
am I cannot go on being bon enfant forever—I must have, so to speak, the
encouragement of a bottle at intervals; and I was thinking of taking Edelgard
away and giving her, before the others returned to their caravans, a brief
description of what maturity combined with calf-like enjoyment looks like to
bystanders, when Mrs. Menzies-Legh passing on the arm of a partner caught
sight of my face, let her partner go, and came up to me.
“I suppose,” she said (and she had at least the grace to hesitate), “it would
be no good asking—asking you to—dance?”
I stared at her in undisguised astonishment.
“Are you not dreadfully bored, standing there alone?” she said, as I did
not answer. “Won’t you—” (again she had the grace to hesitate)—“won’t
you—dance?”
Pointedly, and still staring amazed, I inquired of her with whom, for
really I could hardly believe——
“With me, if—if you will,” said she, a rather lame attempt at a smile and
a distinctly anxious look in her eyes showing that at least it was only a
momentary aberration.
Momentary or not, however, I am not the man to smile with feigned
gratification when what is needed is rebuke, especially in the case of this
lady who of all others needed one so often and so badly.
“Why,” I exclaimed, not caring to conceal my opinion, “why—this is
matriarchy!”
And turning on my heel I made my way at once to my wife, stopped her
whirlings, drew her away from her partner’s arm (Jellaby’s, by the way),
made her take her husband’s and without a word led her out of the room.
But, as I passed the door I saw the look of (I should think pretended)
astonishment of Mrs. Menzies-Legh’s face give way to the appearance of the
dimple, to a sudden screwing together of the upper and lower eyelashes, and
my friends will be able to form a notion of how complete was the havoc
England had wrought in all she had been taught to understand and reverence
in her youth when I tell them that what she was manifestly trying not to do
was to laugh.
CHAPTER XIX
E SSENTIALLY, as I have already pointed out, bon enfant, I seldom let a

bad yesterday spoil a promising to-day; and when on peeping through
my curtains next morning I saw the sun had turned our forbidding camp
of the night before into a bland warm place across which birds darted
singing, a cheery whistle formed itself on my lips and I became aware of
that inward satisfaction our neighbours (to whom we owe, I frankly
acknowledge, much besides Alsace and Lorraine) have aptly named the joie
de vivre.
Left to myself this joie would undoubtedly always continue
uninterruptedly throughout the day. The greater then, say I, the
responsibility of those who damp it. Indeed, the responsibility resting on the
shoulders of the people who cross one’s path during the day is far more
tremendous than they in the thickness of their skins imagine. I will not,
however, at present go into that, having gradually in the course of writing
this become aware that what I shall probably do next will be to collect and
embody all my more metaphysical side into a volume to itself with plenty
of room in it, and will here, then, merely ask my hearers to behold me
whistling in my caravan on that bright August morning, whistling, and
ready, as every sound man should be, to leave the annoyances of yesterday
beneath their own dust and begin the new day in the spirit of “Who knows
but before nightfall I shall have conquered the world?”
My mother (a remarkable woman) used to tell me it was a good plan to
start like that, and indeed I believe the results by nightfall would be
surprisingly encouraging if only other people would leave one alone. For, as
they meet you, each one by his behaviour takes away a further portion of
that which in the morning was so undimmed. Why, sometimes just Edelgard
at breakfast has by herself torn off the whole stock of it at once; and
generally by dinner there is but little left. It is true that occasionally after
dinner a fresh wave of it sets in, but sleep absorbs that before it has had
time, as the colloquialists would say, so much as to turn round.
My hearers, then, without my going further into this, must conceive me
whistling and full of French joie in the subdued sunlight of the Elsa’s
curtained interior on that bright summer morning at Frogs’ Hole Farm.
The floor sloped, for during the night the Elsa’s left hind wheel had sunk
into an uncobbled portion of the yard where the soft mud offered no
resistance, but even the prospect of having to dig this out before we could
start did not depress me. I thought I had noticed my head sinking lower and
lower during my dreams, and after having, half asleep, endeavoured to
correct this impression by means of rolling up my day clothes and putting
them beneath my pillow and finding that it made no difference, I decided it
must be a nightmare and let well alone. In the morning, on waking after
Edelgard’s departure, I realized what had happened, and if any of you ever
caravan you had better see when you go to bed that all four of your wheels
are on that which I called at Queenboro’ terra cotta (you will remember I
explained why it was my wife was unable to be amused) or you will have
some pretty work cut out for you next morning.
Even this prospect, however, did not, as I say, depress me. Dumb objects
like caravans have no such power, and as nobody not dumb had yet crossed
my path I was still, so to speak, untarnished. I had even made up my mind
to forget the half-hour with Edelgard the previous night after the ball, and
since a willingness to forget is the same thing as a willingness to forgive I
think you will all agree that I began that day very well.
Descending to breakfast, I experienced a slight shock (the first breath of
tarnish) on finding no one but Mrs. Menzies-Legh and the nondescripts
there. Mrs. Menzies-Legh, however, though no doubt feeling privately
awkward managed to behave as though nothing had happened, hoped I had
slept well, and brought my coffee. She did not talk as much as usual, but
attended to my wants with an assiduousness that pointed to her being, after
all, ashamed.
I inquired of her with the dignity that means determined distance where
the others were, and she said gone for a walk.
She remarked on the beauty of the day, and I replied, “It is indeed.”
She then said, slightly sighing, that if only the weather had been like that
from the first the tour would have been so much more enjoyable.
On which I observed, with reserved yet easy conversation, that the
greater part still lay before us, and who knew but that from then on it was
not going to be fine?
At this she looked at me in silence, her head poised slightly on one side,
seriously and pensively, as she had done among the Bodiam ruins; then
opened her mouth as though to speak, but thinking better of it got up instead
and fetched me more food.
At last, thought I, she was learning the right way to set about pleasing;
and I could not prevent a feeling of gratification at the success of my
method with her. There was an unusually good breakfast too, which
increased this feeling—eggs and bacon, a combined luxury not before seen
on our table. The fledglings hung over the stove with heated cheeks
preparing relays of it under Mrs. Menzies-Legh’s directions, who, while she
directed, held the coffee-pot in her arms to keep it warm. She explained she
did so for my second cup. I might and indeed I would have suspected that
she did so not to keep the coffee but her arms warm, if it had not been such
a grilling day. Heat quivered in a blue haze over the hop-poles of the
adjacent field. The sunless farmhouse looked invitingly cool and shady now
that the surrounding hill-tops were one glare of light. To hold warm coffee
in one’s arms on such a morning could not possibly show anything but a
meritorious desire to make amends; and as I am not a man to do what the
scriptural call quench the smoking flax, and yet not a man to forgive too
quickly recently audacious ladies, I dexterously mingled extreme politeness
with an unshakable reserve.
But I did not care to prolong what was practically a tête-à-tête one
moment more than necessary, and could not but at last perceive in her
persistent replenishings of my cup and plate the exactly contrary desire in
the lady. So I got up with a courteously declining, “No, no—a reasonable
man knows when to leave off,” murmured something about seeing to
things, bowed, and withdrew.
Where I withdrew to was the hop-field and a cigar.
I lay down in the shade of these green promises of beer in a corner
secure from observation, and reflected that if the others could waste time
taking supererogatory exercise I might surely be allowed an interval of
calm; and as there are no mosquitoes in England, at least none that I ever
saw, it really was not unpleasant for once to contemplate nature from the
ground. But I must confess I was slightly nettled by the way the rest of the
party had gone off without waiting to see whether I would not like to go
too. At first, busied by breakfast, I had not thought of this. Presently, in the
hop-field, it entered my mind, and though I would not have walked far with
them it would have been pleasant to let the rest go on ahead and remain
myself in some cool corner talking to my gentle but lately so elusive friend.
I must say also that I felt no little surprise that Edelgard should gad away
in such a manner before our caravan had been tidied up and after what I had
said to her the last thing the night before. Did she then think, in her
exuberant defiance, that I would turn to and make our beds for her?
My cigar being finished I lay awhile thinking of these things, fanned by
a gentle breeze. Country sounds, at a distance to make them agreeable,
gradually soothed ear and brain. A cock crowed just far enough away. A
lark sang muffled by space. The bells of an invisible church—Raggett’s,
probably—began a deadened and melodious ringing. Well, I was not going;
I smiled as I thought of Raggett and the eagle, forced to make the best of
things by themselves. All round me was a hum and a warmth that was
irresistible. I did not resist it. My head dropped; my limbs relaxed; and I fell
into a doze.
This doze was, as it turned out, extremely à propos, for by the time it
was over and I had once more become conscious, the morning was well
advanced and the caravaners had had ample time to get back from their
walk and through their work. Sauntering in among them I found everything
ready for a start except the Elsa, which, still with its left hind wheel sunk in
the soil, was being doctored by Menzies-Legh, Jellaby, and old James.
“Hullo,” said Jellaby, looking up in the midst of his heated pushing and
pulling as I appeared, “been enjoying yourself?”
Menzies-Legh did not even look up, but continued his efforts with drops
of moisture on his saturnine brow.
Well, here my experience as an artillery officer accustomed to getting
gun-carriages out of predicaments enabled me at once to assume authority,
and drawing up a camp stool I gave them directions as they worked. They
did not, it is true, listen much, thinking as English people so invariably do
that they knew better, but by not listening they merely added another half-
hour to their labour, and as it was fine and warm and sitting superintending
them much less arduous than marching, I had no real objection.
I told Menzies-Legh this at the time, but he did not answer, so I told him
again when we were on the road about the half-hour he might have saved if
he had worked on my plan. He seemed to be in a more than usually bad
temper, for he only shrugged his shoulders and looked glum; and my
hearers will agree that Mrs. Menzies-Legh’s John was not a possession for
England to be specially proud of.
We journeyed that day toward Canterbury, a town you, my friends, may
or may not have heard of. That it is an English town I need not say, for if it
were not would we have been going there? And it is chiefly noted, I
remembered, for its archbishop.
This gentleman, I was told by Jellaby on my questioning him, walks
directly behind the King’s eldest son, and in front of all the nobles in
processions. He is a pastor, but how greatly glorified! He is the final
expansion, the last word, of that which in the bud was only a curate. Every
English curate, like Buonaparte’s soldiers are said to have done, carries in
his handbag the mitre of an archbishop. I can only regard it as a blessing
that our Church has not got them, for I for one would find it difficult with
this possibility in view ever to be really natural to a curate. As it is I am
perfectly natural. With absolute simplicity I show ours his place and keep
him to it; and I am equally simple with our Superintendents and General
Superintendents, the nearest approach our pure and frugal Church goes to
bishops and archbishops. There is nothing glorified about them. They are
just respectable elderly men, with God-fearing wives who prepare their
dinner for them day by day. “And, Jellaby,” said I, “can as much be said for
the wives of your archbishops?”
“No,” said he.
“Another point, then,” said I, with the jesting manner one uses to gild
unpalatable truth, “on which we Germans are ahead.”
Jellaby pushed his wisp of hair back and mopped his forehead. From my
position at my horse’s head I had called to him as he was walking quickly
past me, for I perceived he had my poor gentle little friend in tow and was
once again inflicting his society on her. He could not, however, refuse to
linger on my addressing him, and I took care to ask him so many questions
about Canterbury and its ecclesiastical meaning that Frau von Eckthum was
able to have a little rest.
A faint flush showed she understood and appreciated. No longer obliged
to exert herself conversationally, as I had observed she was doing when
they passed, she dropped into her usual calm and merely listened attentively
to all I had to say. But we had hardly begun before Mrs. Menzies-Legh,
who was in front, happened to look round, and seeing us immediately added
her company to what was already more than company enough, and put a
stop to anything approaching real conversation by herself holding forth. No
one wanted to hear her; least of all myself, to whom she chiefly addressed
her remarks. The others, indeed, were able to presently slip away, which
they did to the rear of our column, I think, for I did not see them again; but
I, forced to lead my horse, was helpless.
I leave it to you, my friends, to decide what strictures should be passed
on such persistency. I cannot help feeling that it was greatly to my credit
that I managed to keep within bounds of politeness under such
circumstances. One thing, however, is eternally sure: the more a lady
pursues, the more a gentleman withdraws, and accordingly those ladies who
throw feminine decorum to the winds only defeat their own ends.
I said this—slightly veiled—to Mrs. Menzies-Legh that morning, taking
an opportunity her restless and leaping conversation offered to administer
the little lesson. No veils, however, were thin enough for her to see through,
and instead of becoming red and startled she looked at me through her
eyelashes with an air of pretended innocence and said, “But, Baron dear,
what is feminine decorum?”
As though feminine decorum or modesty or virtue were things that could
be explained in any words decent enough to fit them for a gentleman to use
to a lady!
That was a tiring day. Canterbury is a tiring place; at least it would be if
you let it. I did not, however, let it tire me. And such a hot place! It is a
steaming town with the sun beating down on it, and full of buildings and
antiquities one is told one must be longing to look at. After a day’s march in
the dust it is not antiquities one longs for, and I watched with some
contempt the same hypocritical attitude take possession of the party that had
distinguished it at Bodiam.
We arrived there about four, and Menzies-Legh pitched on an
exceedingly ugly camping ground on a slope just outside the city, with villa
residences so near that their inhabitants could observe us, if they had
telescopes, from their windows. It was a field from which the corn had been
cut, and the hard straw remaining hurt one’s weary feet; nor had it any
advantages that I could see, though the others spoke of the view. This, if
you please, consisted of the roofs of the houses in the town and a cathedral
rising from their midst in a network of scaffolding. I pointed this out to
them as they stood staring, but Menzies-Legh was quite unshaken in his
determination to stay just on that spot, in spite of there being a railway line
running along the bottom of the field and a station with all its noises within
a stone’s throw. I thought it odd to have come to a town at all, for till then
the party had been unanimous in its desire to avoid even villages, but on my
remarking on this they murmured something about the cathedral, as though
the building below, or rather the mass of scaffolding, were enough to excuse
the most inconsistent conduct.
The heat of that shadeless stubblefield was indescribable. It did not
possess a tree. At the bottom was, as I have said, the railway. At the top,
just above where we were, a market garden, a thing of vegetables, whose
aim is to have as few shadows as possible. Languidly the party made
preparations for settling down. Languidly and after a long delay Menzies-
Legh dragged out the stew-pot. In spite of the heat I was as hungry as a man
ought to be who, at four o’clock, has not yet dined, and as I watched the
drooping caravaners listlessly preparing the potatoes and cabbages and
boiled bacon that I now knew so very thoroughly, this having been our meal
(except once or twice when we had chickens, or, in extremity, underdone
sausages) since the beginning of the tour, a brilliant thought illuminated the
gloom of my brain: Why not slip away unnoticed, and down in the town
cause myself to be served in the dining-room of an hotel with freshly
roasted meat and generous wine?
Very cautiously I raised myself from the hard hot stubble.
Casually I glanced at the view.
With an air of preoccupation I went behind the Elsa, the first move
toward freedom, as though to fetch some accessory of the meal from our
larder.
“Do you want anything, Otto?” asked my officious and tactless wife
trotting after me—a thing she never does when I do want anything.
Naturally I was a little snappish: but then if she had left me alone would
I have snapped? Wives are great forcers of faults upon a man. So I snapped;
and she departed, chidden.
Looking about me, up at the sky, and round the horizon, as though intent
on thoughts of weather, I inconspicuously edged toward the market garden
and the gate. With a man in the garden searching for slugs I spent a moment
or two conversing, and then, a backward glance having assured me the
caravaners were still drooping in listless preparation round the stew-pot, I
sauntered, humming, through the gate.
Immediately I ran into Jellaby, who, a bucket of water in each hand, was
panting along the road.
“Hullo, Baron,” he gasped; “enjoying yourself?”
“I am going,” said I with much presence of mind combined with the
seriousness that repudiates any idea of enjoyment, “to buy some matches.
Ours are running short.”
“Oh,” said he, plumping down his buckets and fumbling among the folds
of his flappy clothes, “I can lend you some. Here you are.”
And he held out a box.
“Jellaby,” said I, “what is one box to a whole—shall we call it
household? My wife requires many matches. She is constantly striking
them. It is her husband’s duty to see that she has enough. Keep yours. And
farewell.”
And walking at a pace that prohibited pursuit by a man with buckets I
left him.
I have had so many dinners in dining-rooms since that one at Canterbury,
ordered repasts without grease and that kept hot, that the wonder of it has
lost in my memory much of its first brightness. You, my hearers, who dine
as I now do regularly and well, would hardly if I could still describe be able
to enter into my feelings. I found a cool room in an inn with the pleasantly
un-English name Fleur de Lys, and a sympathetic waiter who fell in at once
with my views about fresh air and shut all the windows. I had a newspaper,
and I sipped a cognac while the meal was preparing. I ordered everything
on the list except bacon, chickens, and sausages. I also would not eat
potatoes, and declined, as a vegetable, cabbage. I drank much wine, full-
bodied and generous, but I refused after dinner to drink coffee.
Filled and hallowed, once more in thorough tune with myself and life
and ready to take any further experiences the day might bring with
unruffled geniality, I left toward dusk the temple that had thus blest me
(after debating within myself whether it would not be prudent having regard
to the future in further lanes and fields to sup first, and regretfully realizing
that I could not), and leisurely made my way across the street to that other
temple, whose bells announced the inevitable service.
My decision to peep cautiously in and see whether the parson were alone
before definitely committing myself to a pew was unnecessary, first because
there were no pews but a mighty emptiness, and secondly because, along
the dusk of this emptiness, groups of persons made their way to a vast flight
of steps dividing the place into two and leading up to a region, into which
they disappeared, of glimmering lights. Too clever now by far to go where
there were lights and praying might be demanded of me, I wandered on
tiptoe among the gathering shadows at the other end. It grew quickly darker
among the towering pillars and dim, painted windows. The bells left off; the
organ began to rumble about; and a distant voice, with a family likeness to
that of Raggett, sing-songed something long. It had no ups and downs, no
breaks; it was a drawn out thread of sound, thin and sweet like a trickle of
liquid sugar. Then many voices took up the sing-song, broadening it out
from a thread to a band. Then came the single trickle again; and so they
went on alternately, while I, hidden among the pillars, listened very well
pleased.
When the organ began, and an endless singing and repeating of the same
tune, I cautiously advanced nearer in search of something to sit on. To the
right of the steps I found what I wanted, an empty space in itself as big as
our biggest church in Storchwerder but small in comparison to the rest, with
immense windows full of the painted glass that becomes so confused and
meaningless in the dusk, no lights, and here and there a chair or two.
I sat down at the foot of a huge pillar in this dark and unobserved corner,
while the organ above me and the singing voices filled the spaces of the
roof with their slumber-inciting repetitions. Presently, as a tired and
comfortable man would do, I fell asleep, and was only wakened by the
subdued murmur just round the edge of the pillar of two people talking, and
I instantly, almost before my eyes opened, recognized that it was Frau von
Eckthum and Jellaby.
They were apparently sitting on some chairs I had noticed as I came
round to the greater obscurity of mine. They were so close that it was
practically into my ear that they spoke. The singing was finished, and I
fancy the congregation had dispersed, for the organ was playing softly and
the glimmer of lights had gone out.
My ears are as quick as any man’s, and I was greatly amused at the
situation. “Now,” thought I, “I shall hear what sort of stuff Jellaby inflicts
on patient and inexperienced ladies.”
It also occurred to me that it would be interesting to hear how she talked
to him, and so discover whether the libel were true that except in my
presence she chatted and was jocular. Jocular? Can anything be less what
one wishes in the woman one admires? Of course she was not, and Mrs.
Menzies-Legh was only (very naturally) jealous. I therefore sat quite still,
and became extremely alert and wide awake.
They were certainly not laughing. That, however, may have been the
cathedral—not that men of Jellaby’s stamp have even a rudimentary sense
of reverence and decency—but anyhow part of the libel was disposed of,
for the gentle lady was serious. She was, it is true, a good deal more fluent
than I knew her, but she seemed moved by some strong emotion which no
doubt accounted for that. What I could not account for was her displaying
emotion to a person like Jellaby. The first thing, for instance, that I heard
her say was, “It is all my fault.” And her voice vibrated with penitence.
“Oh, but it wasn’t, you know,” said Jellaby.
“Yes, it was. And I feel I ought to take a double share of the burden, and
instead I don’t take any.”
Burden? What burden could the tender lady possibly have to bear that
would not gladly be borne for her by many a masculine shoulder, including
mine? I was about to put my head round the pillar’s edge to assure her of
this when she began to speak again.
“I did try—at first,” she said. “But I—I simply can’t. So I shift it on to
Di.”
Di, my friends, is Mrs. Menzies-Legh, christened with prophetic
paganism Diana.
“An extremely sensible thing to do,” thought I, remembering the
wiriness of Di.
“She is very wonderful,” said Jellaby.
“Yes,” I silently agreed, “most.”
“She is an angel,” said her (I suppose naturally) partial sister, whose
sentiments were besides, no doubt, at that moment coloured by the
surroundings in which she found herself. But I could not help being
entertained by this example of lovable blindness.
“It is so sweetly good of her to keep him off us,” continued Frau von
Eckthum. “She does it so kindly. So unselfishly. What can it be like to have
such a husband?”
“Ah,” thought I, a light illuminating my mind, “they are talking of our
friend John. Naturally his charming sister-in-law cannot bear him. Nor
should she be called upon to do so. To bear her husband is solely a wife’s
affair.”
“What can it be like?” repeated Frau von Eckthum, in the voice of one
vainly trying to realize something beyond words bad.
“I can’t think,” said Jellaby, basely, I thought, for he professed much
outward friendship for John.
“Of course she is amused—in a way,” continued Frau von Eckthum, “but
that sort of amusement soon palls, doesn’t it?”
“Extraordinarily soon,” said Jellaby.
“Before it has so much as begun,” thought I, recollecting the man’s
sallow, solemn visage. But then it is no part of a wife’s functions to be
amused.
“And she is really sorry for him,” said Frau von Eckthum.
“Indeed?” thought I, entertained by the patronizing attitude implied.
“She says,” continued her gentle sister, “that his loneliness, whether he
knows it or not, makes her ache.”
Well, I did not mind Mrs. Menzies-Legh aching, so thought nothing
definite there.
“She doesn’t want him to notice we get out of his way—she is afraid he
might be hurt. Do you think he would be?”
“No,” said Jellaby. “Pure leather.”
I agreed, though once again surprised at Jellaby’s baseness.
“I can’t think,” continued Frau von Eckthum—“I suppose it’s because I
am so bad—but I really cannot think how she can endure him, and in such
doses.”
“He is undoubtedly,” said Jellaby, “a very grievous bounder.”
“What,” I wondered, “is a bounder?” But I applauded Jellaby’s
sentiment nevertheless, for there was no mistaking its nature, though his
baseness was really amazing.

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The Story of International Relations Part One Cold Blooded Idealists 1St Edition Edition Jo Anne Pemberton Full Chapter

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The Story Of International Relations,

Part One: Cold-Blooded Idealists 1st

Knud Erik Jørgensen

Ole Jacob Sending

More information about this series at

Palgrave Studies in International Relations

Cover illustration: © Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo

I am considerably indebted to a number of people who have supported me

1 The League of Nations and the Study of International

2 The League of Nations and Origins of the International

3 The Paris Peace Conference, Racial Equality and the

4 The Quest for a Machinery of Cooperation in the Pacific:

5 The Institute of Pacific Relations 1927–1929 and the

6 International Studies in 1931: From Copenhagen to

7 The Lessons of Manchuria467

BCCIS British Coordinating Committee for International Studies

SDN Société des Nations

Fig. 1.1 International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation at the side of the

The League of Nations and the Study

International Studies in the Interwar Years

© The Author(s) 2020 1

Fig. 1.1 International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation at the side of the

­ ranco-­German rapprochement there could be no assurance of peace and

involved in promoting the study of international relations in the interwar

The ISC’s discussions of the topics of collective security and peaceful

The Origins of Intellectual Cooperation

description that Bourgeois earned: ‘apostle’ of international intellectual

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an increasing

the UIA was described by contemporary students of the LON as ‘one of

­ ublication involving the ‘coordination of the principal desiderata in all

La Fontaine’s proposal met with lively resistance from George Nicoll

what can best favour intellectual co-operation is private effort … [and] …

in all countries.’49 At the same time, however, the secretary-general also

‘climate of feeling’ in the assembly at the time.55 Thus, irrespective of the

education, the Fifth Committee eliminated the words et d’éducation from

towards the Intellectual Cooperation that was manifested by the other

The International Committee on Intellectual

According to Frank P. Walters, an advisor to Drummond who later

Finally in regard to the make-up of the ICIC, the strength of French

France. The visit was seen as significant in terms of improving Franco-­

Einstein’s retraction of his acceptance greatly disappointed those who

than simply the absence of Einstein.119 In this regard, Murray argued

The League of Nations Committee of Intellectual Cooperation has issued

Unsurprisingly, Murray’s harsh critique raised the ire of Bergson, who

return to the committee, he was certain that such an invitation would be

in his ‘transcendental speculations’ to the ideal of the LON.132 Despite this

departure, Krüss was asked by one of its officials to seek to ‘uncover

Henri Bergson and Intellectual Cooperation

E SSENTIALLY, as I have already pointed out, bon enfant, I seldom let a

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1 The League of Nations and the Study of International

2 The League of Nations and Origins of the International

3 The Paris Peace Conference, Racial Equality and the

4 The Quest for a Machinery of Cooperation in the Pacific:

5 The Institute of Pacific Relations 1927–1929 and the

6 International Studies in 1931: From Copenhagen to

7 The Lessons of Manchuria467

ranco-German rapprochement there could be no assurance of peace and

ublication involving the ‘coordination of the principal desiderata in all

France. The visit was seen as significant in terms of improving Franco-