The year 1931 cowered under economic blizzard. Britain, the major Western power in the Far East, was in the midst of political and financial crisis and about to go off the gold standard, the bourses of Europe were trembling on the edge of panic, the Weimar Republic was dying and the United States was sunk in the slough of depression. Japan’s act was indeed embarrassing in view of all the machinery set up to restrain aggression but as the French Premier André Tardieu said, it was “a long way off.”
