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FOURTH SESSION

THE RELATION OF WOMEN TO THE PEACE MOVEMENT

CARNEGIE HALL

Tuesday Morning, April Sixteenth, at 10.30

MRS. ANNA GARLIN SPENCER Presiding

MRS. JULIA WARD HOWE, MRS. MAY WRIGHT SEWALL, Guests of Honor.

MRS. SPENCER:

The Women's Session of the Peace Congress will now open, with the singing of the hymn of invocation, in which I hope the audience, as well as the chorus, will join.

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LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: This meeting is to consider how the great basic institutions of society, of which women are a vital part, stand related to the Peace Movement. We need to

begin all our interpretation of the present with some accurate knowledge of the past, and our first speaker will give us a brief outline of the history of the Peace Movement. Lucia Ames Mead, of Boston, the Chairman of the Peace Committees of the National Council of Women and National American Women Suffrage Association, and author of the "Peace Primer," and other important literature of the subject, will now address you.

History of the Peace Movement

MRS. LUCIA AMES MEAD.

Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people who can discern the meaning of the history that is now making. It is that, just as the eighteenth century achieved peace and justice between thirteen states and the nineteenth century extended peace and justice between forty-five states, the twentieth century is to secure peace with justice between all the forty-six nations of the globe. The same principles of organization which created a United States are to create a United World. Internal violence and disorder may endure much longer, but duelling between nations is to cease. Democracy and modern commerce and a growing sense of justice have decreed that submarines and dynamite shall not usurp the place of judge and jury. The movement for international peace is not beginning, but is now approaching its consummation.

Silent forces have been at work ever since the great Dutch statesman, Hugo Grotius, published his "Rights of War and Peace," whilst Bradford and Carver were building their log houses in little Plymouth. Of this book, Andrew D. White has said "of all works not claiming to be inspired, it has proved the greatest blessing to humanity." Time forbids to speak of brave George Fox, who founded the society of Friends,-the oldest peace society in the world;-of his brilliant successor, William Penn, who published a remarkable "plan for the Permanent Peace of Europe"; of Immanuel Kant, a century later, who with philosophic wisdom proclaimed that the world could not have peace until it was organized, and that it could not be safely federated until it had representative government. But in this brief summary, I must confine myself to a fraction of what has happened

since 1815, when David Low Dodge founded the first peace society in the world. He was a noble New York merchant whose posterity unto the third generation have honored this city by their disinterested service. Since that year nearly five hundred peace societies and auxiliary branches have been established in the world, of which the American Peace Society with headquarters in Boston is the oldest in the country, and the New York Peace Society is one of the youngest and most vigorous. The International Peace Bureau is at Berne, Switzerland.

During the first half of the century Noah Worcester, William Ellery Channing, William Ladd, Elihu Burritt and Charles Sumner, and other noble citizens of Massachusetts worked out the scheme for a Permanent International Tribunal which came to be known in Europe as "the American Way." They, like so many pioneers, died ere they saw the realization of their hopes. But they blazed the path which statesmen and captains of industry are entering to-day.

Among the silent forces which have been promoting the rational settlement of international difficulties have been those missionaries of the Most High-democracy, steam and electricity. Within a hundred years the world has shrunk so small that yesterday's doings on five continents are reported every morning at our breakfast table. A century ago a war in Manchuria would not have been known here until four months after it had begun, and would in no way have affected us. To-day commerce has so expanded that every merchant must consider the whole world in estimating his supply and the demand. Investors have become so sensitive that the hysteria in this country twelve years ago over the possibility of war with England about a boundary line. in Venezuela cost us $100,000,000 in foreign investments.

Slowly we are learning that, "in the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim," that as a matter of business we can not allow prospective customers to be beggared by belligerent neighbors or the highways of commerce to be blocked by the shameful legalized piracy that up to date has menaced the peaceful merchantman in war time. Migration, travel, the photograph and school book have modified national prejudice, born of ignorance and isolation. Such a new book as Bridgman's "World Organizations," emancipates the reader from the narrow outlook of the past and opens up a new world of thought.

When Kant declared representative government to be a necessary prerequisite for an organized and peaceful world, no nation in the world had real representation. To-day no nation in Christendom is without some degree of it. Even Russia has its Duma. Outside of Christendom, Japan has a representative Assembly; within six months Persia has gained one, and China is promised one within twelve years. Thus, for the first time in history, world organization is now a possibility.

The first step towards it which commanded the world's attention was the Czar's manifesto of August, 1898. This resulted partly from alarm over the frightful increase of war budgets without any increase in safety, and partly from the profound impression made by the great work on "The Future of War" by the eminent economist and imperal councillor, Jean de Bloch. This demonstrated that under modern conditions war between equally equipped forces was futile and would result simply in bankruptcy if fought to a finish, with victory for neither side. The Czar declared that increase of armaments-the supposed preventive of war-was bringing about "the very cataclysm it was designed to avert." In fact a long armed peace was as great a drain as a brief war. In response to his invitation one hundred delegates from the twenty-six nations that had representatives at St. Petersburg met on May 18, 1899, in "The House in the Wood," at The Hague, and behind locked doors, divided into committees, they worked steadily for three months. At first pessimistic and skeptical, they became inspired with hope through the influence of Lord Pauncefote, Baron d'Estournelles de Constant, Andrew D. White, our minister at Berlin, who headed the American delegation, and a few others, men of faith and vision who knew their subject and did most of the laborious and tactful work. At a critical moment, when Germany's opposition seemed about to frustrate all hope of co-operation, Mr. Holls, an American, was sent by Mr. White to Berlin to see Hohenlohe and Von Bulow. They declared the indifference of the German people in the problem and questioned whether the American people cared much about it. They were amazed to see the multitude of letters and cablegrams from all over the country which he showed as evidence of our concern. Among them was a telegram from thirty-one Baptist clergymen in Oregon, each one of whom had paid a dollar to send it. Another was a prayer, written by a

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