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INTRODUCTION.

YOUNG soldier, recently returned from France, to whom I had been speaking of women and world peace, said: "Men will read your book but not women. I have been home three months and I have heard but one woman mention a League of Nations."

It may be true that women in the aggregate are not interested in world organization. But I believe that women will read a book on a league of nations written by a woman to women, if they realize that to organize the unity of mankind is the way, and the only way, to safeguard human life. Three reasons offer me foundation for this belief. First, in many states women are now one-half the electorate, and are therefore politically responsible for the fate of a League of Nations. Second, owing to the exhaustion of man-power in Europe, women will have to help carry on the torch of progress as they have never helped before. And in the third place, women were never so free to be interested and so fitted to contribute to social creativeness as to-day.

We have only to pause and consider the relative effects of the war upon men and women as a

whole to recognize the authority for this belief. We have heard frequent complaints of the paucity of ideas at Versailles and in Europe generally to cope with new and acute situations. And why not? Europe has been decimated of its masculine creative potentialities. The creative forces cannot function except through the individual center, and these individual centers, in appalling numbers, have been swept away. Six million soldiers killed upon battlefields; eighteen million crippled and mutilated, and as many again destroyed by accident or disease!

Consider, on the other hand, the effect of participation in war activities for four years upon the lives of women. It broke every shackle of tradition that had obstinately remained unbroken. It freed their energies, liberated their minds and trained their activities as they had never been liberated and trained in the history of the world. Every war has had this emancipating effect upon women, the necessities of the hour pushing them out of the cloister into the open, out of the strictly feminine into the human, although the instrument of their liberation has been retrogressive and inhuman. Finally the war has deprived countless women of husbands, everywhere, leaving them free to contribute to social problems as they might otherwise not be free.

If it be true that women are not interested in a League of Nations, I believe that it is partly because no special attempt has been made to interest

them. The wishes of many forward-looking women to build the aspirations of women into the Peace Treaty and League Covenant at Paris were ignored. A librarian recently told me that this same negligence to relate this great subject to the interests of women ran through the three hundred or more books she had catalogued on international organization. Moreover, although there were many books on sovereignty, nationality, economics and all the varying phases of world organization, there was no simple, comprehensive book, giving the subject as a whole, that she could give to busy women and say, "Here is the why and the how of democratic world organization. It's your task as well as your brother's." So I determined to try, however imperfectly, to write such a volume for women too absorbed in office or home to read widely on this subject, themselves, but who still, I knew, were intensely interested.

Forty different plans for world unity were submitted to the Paris Conference - every kind of a League of Nations, except a Woman's League.

This book is an effort to sketch briefly the necessary outlines of world guarantees from the woman's point of view, outlines to work towards, through the Paris Covenant. For whatever its faults, we have here at least the germ of world union to be moulded into the Democratic ideal.

The book has for its guiding principle that a League, to be efficacious, must eliminate the

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historic causes of war, and that to be pragmatic it must be a human covenant working through the political and economic instrument to protect the world's common interests.

It holds that if the covenant that has already been created is not the chart humanity may safely sail by, then women must help make it a safe chart. If it is not a human instrument for safeguarding life, women must help amend it as the Constitution of the United States has been amended, until it become a human instrument for guarding life. It it be a League of privilege, a League for politicians and not a League for peoples, women must help make it a League for peoples since women are (almost) people in the leading democracies of the world.

I realize that I have tried to cover a wide surface, and that from a political, economic, or even a literary point of view diffusion may be dangerous. The only failure, however, that could really count would be a failure to convince women that world peace is equally woman's work; that if the world is ever again turned into a slaughterhouse, women will be equally responsible with men, and that the only way to secure a new world order is through supporting a new instrument that will make the guarding of our common humanity a common world task.

Bellport, Long Island, N. Y.

F. G. T.

CHAPTER I.

WOMEN AND A DEMOCRATIC LEAGUE OF NATIONS.

"Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this." Esther 4: 14.

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PEACE Congress can create a League of Nations but it cannot create permanent peace. That is a task for "all of us," men, women and children, especially women, for generations to come.

The League of Nations is on trial for its life. If it fail to work, it will be not because the plan lacks the elements of success, but because we of little faith have not demanded of ourselves that it succeed. If it fail to stimulate public enthusiasm, it will be largely, I believe, because no effort has been made to enlist the interest of women.

At first glance, it would seems as if the launching of a League of Nations, like the waging of war, were man's work, but on second thought it is seen to lay the weight of its responsibility upon women as well. It contains the one war aim in which all true women are most interested: that there shall be no more war. It holds the future of women and children in its scope and will decide