Office of the Historian

793.94/2236a: Telegram

The Secretary of State to the Minister in China (Johnson)97

Washington, October 20, 1931—2 p.m.

388. Please deliver to the Acting Minister for Foreign Affairs immediately, as a note, the text which follows. Inform him that an identical note is being communicated by the American Ambassador to Japan to the Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs.

Text:

“The Government and people of the United States have observed with concern the events of the last month in Manchuria. When the difference between China and Japan came to a head on September 19th one of the parties to the dispute referred the matter to the League of Nations and since that time the American Government by representation[s] through diplomatic channels, has steadily cooperated with the League in its efforts to secure a peaceful settlement. A threat of war, wherever it may arise, is of profound concern to the whole world and for this reason the American Government, like other Governments, was constrained to call to the attention of both disputants the serious dangers involved in the present situation.

This Government now desires, as do other signatories of the Treaty for the Renunciation of War, particularly to call to the attention of the Chinese and the Japanese Governments the obligations which they voluntarily assumed when they became parties to that Treaty, especially the obligations of Article II, which reads:

‘The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.’

The American Government takes this occasion again to express its earnest hope that China and Japan will refrain from any measures which might lead to war and that they will find it possible in the near future to agree upon a method for resolving by peaceful means, in accordance with their promises and in keeping with the confident expectations of public opinion throughout the world, the issues over which they are at present in controversy.”

Stimson
  1. The same, mutatis mutandis, to the Chargé in Japan as Department’s No. 200, October 20, 1931, 2 p.m., Foreign Relations, Japan, 1931–1941, vol. i, p. 27.↩