If women find, upon study of the Covenant, that this League is not the League they wish to protect the lives of their sons, then women must take steps to make it such a League, remembering always that there is no substitute for a League of Nations which is immune from risks. Special alliances acknowledge that war is inevitable. A League of Nations alone proclaims that law is the rule and crime (war) the exception. This idea is new among nations as is the idea of trying, in a tribunal, men who began the war, thus making war a legal offense against the public order and placing it in the category of murder and other preventable crimes.

Whatever its shortcomings, the creation of this Covenant represents the most forward step ever taken collectively by a group of nations. For this draft, it must be remembered, is not the work of one man representing the aspirations of one nation. It is the work of many men representing fourteen states and the interests of twelve hundred millions of peoples. The great fact in history is that these nations have been willing to organize their common interests; that the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Belgium, Brazil, China, Czecho-Slovakia, Greece, Poland, Portugal, Roumania and Serbia have unanimously agreed to pledge themselves that, so far as lies within their power, there shall be no more war. No such common covenant ever before was so widely agreed

upon. No more pregnant covenant to protect the life blood of humanity was ever executed by governments stimulated by the sovereign will of suffering peoples.

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the widereaching possibilities of this new instrument upon the interests of women. Every clause in every article in some way reaches out and touches the home in every land. In spite of many limitations it is true as President Wilson said when he read the draft: "A living thing has been born, and we must see to it what clothes we put on it." This "we" applies equally to women. It is for men and women the world over to amplify the league where it needs amplification, and clothe it with garments of their own fashioning.

If the women of the earth might be assembled to pronounce judgment upon the draft, from the woman's point of view, I believe that their first criticism of the covenant, and the first garment that they would create for the draft, would be a toga of democracy to be placed on the shoulders of "all of us." With child-like simplicity they would ask, how can there be universal peace so long as “any of us" is left out? And so, I believe that women who honestly wish to guarantee life would move that the new League enlarge itself to take under its protecting wings, not only the victorious nations, but the broken, defeated countries of Europe endeavoring to take form again. Whatever

their mistakes, and their problems are Herculean, these battle-born republics represent the soul of Europe struggling for embodiment. There can be no hope for peace for the sons of women anywhere while these shattered nations, brow-beaten for centuries, are left outside the cordon of world protection. There can be little hope for their newfound freedom unless they themselves receive steadfast and sincere help from sister nations. The alternative is that they will be driven by the law of inevitable necessity into each other's arms. Then we shall have not one league of nations but two defensive alliances. Then we shall be a league of New Europe against a league of Old Europe and humanity must say farewell for years to come to dreams either of stability or world peace.

Surely, peace-loving women the world over must see that a League of Nations, if it is not to be just another more powerful Balance of Power, must be inclusive and not exclusive; that it cannot sentence several hundred millions of peoples to live as outcasts; people who, in obedience to Western will, have succeeded in overthrowing their feudal autocracies and who must not be left to fall into further chaos, but be helped to find a new life, creating their own interpretation of justice if the League of Nations is to be a league of peace and not a league of war.

The argument that the Central Powers are not yet sufficiently stabilized to enter into a world

league is not logical. Only a world league may stabilize and protect them from devouring wolves, within and without or protect us. Nothing can make nations so ready for democracy as fellowship in a common crusade. All nations wish for peace. All nations are conscious of a common humanity. Ideals of government should not separate while ideals of common human purposes unite. The League of Nations does not dictate to China and Japan their forms of government. It asks only that these countries obey international rules. Why should it determine the government of new states? "The essential test of any state's fitness for the League is that it desires to submit to its conditions." If a country does not obey the common rules, the League has power, both economic and military, to command obedience. If the rules of the League are democratic, the divergent governments within the League, by obeying the rules, in time must become automatically democratic, also.

I believe, too, that women interested above all else in ending war would provide a seamless garment for more democratic representations than is offered in the draft, so that we shall indeed have a league of peoples and not merely a league of conquering governments; that this garment should be made to fit women and labor delegates, and that the rights of small nations should have a stronger guarantee.

To many of us it would seem that the League in its first form is lacking in authority, in that power of international control so necessary to deal with friction between states. If that is true, we shall have the American experience of the Articles of Confederation duplicated: a few years of contention with an inadequate instrument, and then at last a genuine Constitution of a federated world.

But if, from the woman's point of view, the draft of the League of Nations has inherent weaknesses, weakness to be overcome by the insistent voices of an educated public opinion, it as surely has sources of inherent strength. And as women must labor to avert the new instrument's dangers, so must they also labor to strengthen all points tending to preserve universal equilibrium.

Perhaps the most potential possibility for world stability in the draft lies in the creation of a Labor Board, sitting permanently (Article XX), a new and unique organ capable of developing untold strength if it be used and amplified; an organ for protecting those "men, women and children upon whom the great burden of sustaining the work of the world falls. people who go to bed tired and wake up without the stimulation of lively hope." For the first time in history the earth's toilers have an opportunity to touch the helm of government and regulate their destiny and powers -if they will.