793.94/2091c: Telegram
The Secretary of State to the Consul at Geneva (Gilbert)
85. As to an appeal to the Pact of Paris, you should take up with Drummond the following suggestions:
I have been alive to the danger that an independent initiative in Washington might create embarrassment for the work done by the League of Nations. For this reason I have held back and merely cooperated as far as possible in the line pursued by the League. In the question of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, however, I confess I had not seen any danger of embarrassment to the League if the invocation of the Pact were left, as I suggested expressly, in the League Council’s hands. This Pact involves no discussion, no argument, and no investigation. It involves only an expression of a caution or protest representing the signatories’ views. The Pact’s chief efficacy lies in the wide measure of public opinion it evokes, since a caution to the two disputants would probably be joined in by a very large number of the signatories. In 1929 a response came from a large majority of the [Page 168] signatories, although there was no machinery and little time and although the two disputants got into communication hurriedly to forestall the protest. With reference to Drummond’s suggestion that this country alone should address a note calling the attention of Japan and China to the Pact of Paris, to me this seems to mistake the whole purpose of invoking the Pact, namely, to bring as large a percentage as possible of the signatories into action, and in this way mobilizing what virtually is the world’s public opinion against a breach of the peace in Manchuria. Consequently, although I am entirely alive to the danger in ordinary cases of double jurisdiction and in this case have been trying to avoid the least possibility of it, I do not see how the Pact’s invocation, made under the League Council’s auspices, possibly could involve such danger. This danger possibly might occur, on the other hand, if the United States alone and independently were to send such a note under the Kellogg Pact.