It is often suggested that the Far Eastern crisis of 1931–3 marked tlie beginning of the Second World War, that ‘the road… is now clearly visible… from the railway tracks near Mukden to the operations of two bombers over Hiroshima and Nagasaki’. In many eyes, too, this episode was also crucial for die League of Nations and the cause of collective security, an opportunity to vindicate the peace-keeping machinery of 1919 which, had it been taken, might have proved decisive in preventing the slide into international anarchy which followed. ‘This has been the vital test for the League,’ Philip Noel-Baker wrote to Gilbert Murray at the time, ’-– and the greatest opportunity it has ever had, especially in view of U.S.A. cooperation’. When Japan had triumphed nearly two years later, he saw the whole structure of organized international co-operation as being ‘in grave danger’, and the League as ‘never having sunk to so low an ebb in influence and prestige’.