Peace and Bread in Time of War by Jane Addams

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L162
BY
JANE ADDAMS
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS NEWER IDEALS OF PEACE THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH IN THE CITY STREETS TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE A NEW CONSCIENCE AND AN ANCIENT EVIL THE LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
PEACE AND BREAD

IN TIME OF
WAR
BY
JANE ADDAMS
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1922
All rights reserved
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and printed.
Published February, 1922.
J. J. Little
New
Press of & Ives Company York, U. S. A.
This book
is
dedicated in affectionate gratitude
To
HELEN CULVER
Whose understanding mind and magnanimous
spirit
have never failed the writer either in

times of peace or war.
50499O
FOREWORD
following pages are the outgrowth of an attempt to write a brief history of the efforts for
The
made by a small group of women in the United States during the European War, and of their connection with the women of other countries, as together they became organized into the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Such a history would of course be meaningless, unless it portrayed the scruples and convictions upon which these efforts were based. During the writing of it, however, I found myself so increasingly reluctant to interpret the motives of
peace
other people that at length I confined all analAs my reactions were ysis of motives to my own.
can only hope that the autobiographical portrayal of them may prove to be fairly typical and interpretative of many likein
I
no wise unusual,
minded people who,
as the great war progressed, gradually found themselves the protagonists of that most unpopular of all causes peace in time
of war.
I
was
occasionally reminded of a dictum found

vii
viii
FOREWORD
on the cover of a long since extinct magazine entitled "The Arena," which read somewhat in this wise: "We do not possess our ideas, they possess us, and force us into the arena to fight for them." It would be more fitting for our group to say "to be martyred for them," but candor compels the confession that no such dignified fate
was permitted
to state their
portion was the odium accorded those who, because they are not allowed
us.
Our
own
cause, suffer constantly
from
inimical misrepresentation and are often placed in the position of seeming to defend what is a
mere travesty of
their convictions.
We
realize,
therefore, that even the kindest

still
of readers must perforce
look at our group through the distorting spectacles he was made to wear during the long period of war propaganda.
As
the
"Peace and Bread

first
the writing progressed I entitled the book in Time of War." Not because
two words were the touching slogan of war-weary Russian peasants, but because peace and bread had become inseparably connected in
my
mind.
consider myself fortunate
if I
I shall
am
able
to convey to the reader the inevitability of the

relationship.
Hull-House,
Chicago.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
PAGE
FOREWORD
I
vii
AT THE BEGINNING OF THE GREAT WAR
II
THE NEUTRAL CONFERENCE PLUS THE

SHIP
PRESIDENT
FORD
26
III
WILSON'S
POLICIES
AND
THE
49
WOMAN'S PEACE PARTY

IV
REVIEW OF BREAD RATIONS AND WOMAN'S

TRADITIONS
73
V A
VI
VII
VIII
SPECULATION ON BREAD LABOR AND SLOGANS , ,
WAR
91
AFTER THE UNITED STATES ENTERED THE

PERSONAL REACTIONS IN TIME OF
WAR
.
107
WAR
.
132
IN EUROPE DURING THE ARMISTICE

OF
152
178
IX THE AFTERMATH
WAR
X THE
XI
FOOD CHALLENGE TO THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
199
IN EUROPE AFTER
Two
YEARS OF PEACE
223
AN
AFTER
WORD
.
.
247
. .
-.
APPENDIX
253
PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR
PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

CHAPTER
WHEN
I.
AT THE BEGINNING OF THE GREAT WAR.

the news
came
to
America of the open-
which were the beginning of the European Conflict, the reaction against war, as such, was almost instantaneous throughout the This was most strikingly registered in country. the newspaper cartoons and comments which expressed astonishment that such an archaic institution should be revived in modern Europe. procession of women led by the daughter of William Lloyd Garrison walked the streets of New York City in protest against war and the sentiment thus
ing hostilities
expressed,
if
not the march
itself,
was
universally
approved by the press.

Certain professors, with the full approval of their universities, set forth with clarity and sometimes with poignancy the conviction that a war
would
inevitably interrupt all orderly social ad-
PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF
WAR
vance and at its end the long march of civilization would have to be taken up again much nearer to the crude beginnings of human progress.
sent several people lecturing through the country upon the history of the Peace movement and the various instru-
The Carnegie Endowment
mentalities designed to be used in a war crisis such I lectured in twelve of the leading colas this.
I found the audiences of young The questions and eager. both large people which they put were often penetrating, sometimes touching or wistful, but almost never bellicose or Doubtless there were many stuantagonistic.
leges,
where
more belligerent type who did not attend the lectures and occasionally a professor, invariably one of the older men, rose in the audience
dents of the
I to uphold the traditional glories of warfare. also recall a tea under the shadow of Columbia
which was divided into two spirited camps, but I think on the whole it is fair to say that in the fall of 1914 the young people in a dozen of the leading colleges of the East were eager for knowledge as to all the international devices which had been
established for substituting rational negotiation There seemed to have been a somewhat for war.
general reading of Brailsford's "War of Steel and Gold" and of Norman Angell's "Great Illusion." It was in the early fall of 1914 that a small
group of
social
workers held the
first
of a series
BEGINNING OF THE GREAT
WAR
of meetings at the Henry Street Settlement in New York, trying to formulate the reaction to
war on
the part of those
who
for
many
years had
devoted their energies to the reduction of devastating poverty. deavor to nurture
We
human
believed that the enlife
even
in its
most
forms had crossed national boundaries; that those who had given years to its service had become convinced that
humble and
least promising
nothing of social value can be obtained save through wide-spread public opinion and the coMany memoperation of all civilized nations.
bers of this group meeting in the Henry Street Settlement had lived in the cosmopolitan districts
of American
cities.
All of us, through long ex-
perience among the immigrants from many nations, were convinced that a friendly and cooper-
was constantly becoming more all between We believed that possible peoples. end its war, seeking through coercion, not only interrupted but fatally reversed this process of coative relationship
operating good will which, if it had a chance, would eventually include the human family itself. The European War was already dividing our immigrant neighbors from each other. We could not imagine asking ourselves whether the parents of a child who needed help were Italians, and therefore on the side of the Allies, or Dalmatians, and therefore on the side of the Central Powers.
WAR
Such a question was as remote as if during the Balkan war we had anxiously inquired whether the parents were Macedonians or Montenegrins although at one time that distinction had been of paramount importance to many of our neighbors. We revolted not only against the cruelty and barbarity of war, but even more against the reversal of human relationships which war implied. We protested against the "curbed intelligence" and the "thwarted good will," when both a free mind and unfettered kindliness are so sadly needed
in
human
affairs.
later that pacifists
were
In the light of the charge made indifferent to the claims of
justice it is interesting to recall that
we thus early the fact that a sense of emphasized justice had become the keynote to the best political and social
activity in this generaton, but
we
also believed that
justice between men or between nations can be achieved only through understanding and fellowship, and that a finely tempered sense of justice, which alone is of any service in modern civilization, cannot possibly be secured in the storm and
stress of war.
This
is
not only because war
in-
evitably arouses the more primitive antagonisms, but because the spirit of fighting burns away all those impulses, certainly towards the enemy,
which foster the

fore certain that
will to justice.
We
were there-
would be
if war prevailed, all social efforts cast into an earlier and coarser mold.

The
finally
WAR
results of these various discussions
were
put together by
Mr. Paul Kellogg,
editor
of The "Toward
Survey, and the statement entitled the Peace that Shall Last" was given a
wide circulation. Reading it now, it appears to be somewhat exaggerated in tone<because we have

perforce grown accustomed to a world of widespread war with its inevitable consequences of
divisions
and animosities.
effects
The
long
heartening
of these meetings were
felt
by many
of the social workers as they
ways to do what they could against the rising tide of praise for the use of war technique in the world's affairs. One type
proceeded
in their different
of person present at this original conference felt that he must make his protest against war even at
the risk of going to jail
in fact
two of the men
did so testify and took the consequences; another

type performed all non-combatant service open to them through the Red Cross and other agencies throughout the years of the war although privately
holding to their convictions as best they might;
a third, although condemning war in the abstract were convinced of the righteousness of this particular
others
it would end all wars; still war was declared in the United felt, that must surrender all private judgStates, they
war and
that
after
ment, and abide by the decision of the majority. I venture to believe, however, that none of the
WAR
social workers present at that gathering who had been long identified with the poor and the disin-
herited, actually accepted participation in the war without a great struggle, if only because of the reversal in the whole theory and practice of their
daily living.
Several organizations were formed during the next few months, with which we became identified; Miss Wald was the first president of the Union
Against Militarism, and
became chairman of
what was
The called the Women's Peace Party. the for latter came from impulse organization Europe when, in the early winter of 1914, the
war was
discussed from the public platform United States by two women, well known suffragists and publicists, who nationally repreMrs. Pethsented opposing sides of the conflict. ick Lawrence of England first brought to Ameri-
great
in the
can audiences a series of

don, and
join their
"War Aims"
as defined
by the "League of Democratic Control" in Lon-
Mde. Rosika Schwimmer, coming from
Budapest, hoped to arouse American
women
to
general protest Occasionally they spoke from the same platform in a stirring indictment of "the
against war.
European
sisters in a
common enemy
of mankind."
They were
unwil-
ling to leave the United States until they had organized at least a small group pledged to the ad-
WAR
vocacy of both objects; the discussion of reasonable terms of peace, and a protest against war as
a
method of
settling international difficulties.

itself
The Women's Peace Party

come of
cities
was
the out-
a two days' convention held in Washington concluding a series of meetings in different
addressed by Mrs. Lawrence and Madame Schwimmer. The "call" to the convention was issued by Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt and myself, and on January 10, 1915, the new organization was launched at a mass meeting of 3000 people. A ringing preamble written by Mrs. Anna Garlin Spencer was adopted with the following platform
1. The immediate calling of a convention of neutral nations in the interest of early peace. 2. Limitation of armaments and the nationalization of their manufacture. 3. Organized opposition to militarism in our
own
4.
5. 6.
country.
Education of youth in the ideals of peace. Democratic control of foreign policies. The further humanizing of governments
by the extension of the suffrage to women. "Concert of Nations" to supersede "Bal7. ance of Power." 8. Action towards the gradual re-organization of the world to substitute Law for War. The substitution of economic pressure and 9. of non-intercourse for rival armies and navies. 10. Removal of the economic causes of war.
WAR
n. The appointment by our government of a commission of men and women with an adequate
appropriation to promote international peace.
Of
course
all
the world has
since
become
familiar with these "Points," but at the time of

their adoption as a platform they
were newer and
somewhat
startling.
The
tion,"
first
one, as a plan for "continuous media-
had been presented to the convention by Miss Julia G. Wales of the University of Wisconsin, who had already placed it before the legislature of the State. Both houses had given it their approval, and had sent it on with recommendations for adoption to the Congress of the United States. The plan was founded upon the
assumption that the question of peace was a question of terms; that every country desired peace at the earliest possible moment, that peace could be
The plan sugsatisfactory to itself. of Experts an International Commission gested to sit as long as the war continued, with scientific but no diplomatic function; such a commission
had on terms
should explore the issues involved in the struggle in order to make proposals to the belligerents in
a spirit of constructive internationalism. Miss Wales not only defined such a Commission, but
presented a most convincing argument in

half,
its
be-
and we deliberately made the immediate

calling of a
in
WAR
Conference of Neutrals the first plank our new platform. The officers of the newly formed society were Mrs. Anna Garlin Spencer and Mrs. Henry Villard of New York, Mrs. Lucia Ames Mead and
:
Mrs. Glendower Evans of Boston, Mrs. Louis F. Post and Mrs. John J. White of Washington. From Chicago, where headquarters were established, were Mrs. Harriet Thomas as executive officer, Miss Breckenridge of the University of Chicago as treasurer, and myself as Chairman. All of the officers had long been identified with existing Peace organizations, but felt the need of
something more active than the older societies promised to afford. The first plank of our platform, the Conference of Neutrals, seemed so important and withal so reasonable, that our officers
the founding of the orLouis Lochner, secretary of the ganization, with Chicago Peace Society, issued a call to every public organization in the United States whose constituin the
month following
could discover, contained a plank setting forth the obligations of internationalism. These organizations of course included hundreds
tion, so far as
we
of mutual benefit societies, of trade unions and socialist groups, as well as the more formal peace
and reform bodies.
The
call invited
them
to at-
tend a National Emergency Peace Conference at Chicago in March, and to join a Federation of
io

Forces.
WAR
Peace
sponded
resulting
interesting group reto the invitation, and the Conference,
very
in
the
formation
of
the
proposed
Federation, also held large mass meetings urging the call of a Conference of Neutrals.
The Women's Peace

months of
its
Party, during the
first
few
grew rapidly, with flourbranches in California and in Minnesota, ishing as well as in the eastern states. The Boston branch eventually opened headquarters on the first floor of a building in the busy part of Boylston
existence,
and with a membership of twenty-five hundred, carried on a vigorous campaign among the doubting, making public opinion both for reasonable peace terms and for a possible shortenStreet,
number of the leading oring of the war. ganizations of women became affiliated branches of the Women's Peace Party. Women everywhere seemed eager for literature and lectures, and as the movement antedated by six months the
organization of the League to Enforce Peace,
we
had the
field all to ourselves.

it
In the early months of 1915,
was
still
com-
paratively easy to get people together in the name of Peace, and the members of the new organization scarcely realized that they were placing themselves on the side of an unpopular cause. One
in setting out a constructive
obvious task was to unite with other organizations program with which

that an effective
WAR
11
an international public should become so familiar
demand
for
its
fulfillment could
end of the war. This latter undertaking had been brilliantly inaugurated by The League of Democratic Control in England, and two months after our Washington Convention, "The Central Organization for a Durable Peace" was founded in Holland. The American branch of the "Association for the Promotion of International Friendship Among the Churches" also was active and maintained its own representative
be
at the
made
Europe. As a neutral, he at that time was able go from one country to another, and to meet in Holland with Churchmen from both sides of the conflict. We always found him most willing to cooperate with our plans at home and abroad.
in
to
His
successor,
George
felt the sturdy friend of ours, tragedy of his death at Geneva, in 1920. Through the very early spring of 1915, out of
Nasmyth, was and we keenly
also
our eagerness, we tried all sorts of new methods of propaganda, new at least so far as peace societies were concerned. poem which had ap-
London Nation portraying the bepeared wilderment of humble Belgians and Germans sent
in the
suddenly to arms, was set to Beethoven's music and, through the efforts of the Women's Peace
Party,
sung
in
many towns and

sisters,
cities
in
the
United States by the Fuller
three
young
12
WAR
English women, whose voices were most appealThe Carnegie Endowment for International ing. Peace gave us a grant of five thousand dollars
with which
we
financed the Little Theatre
Com-
pany of Chicago, in the production of Gilbert Murray's version of the Trojan women by
Euripides.
The
play was given throughout the
country, including the Panama Exposition at San Francisco. The beautiful lines were beautifully
rendered.
An
audience
invariably
fell
into
solemn
mood
women
as the age-old plaint of war-weary cheated even of death, issued from the
darkened stage, reciting not the glory of War, but "shame and blindness and a world swallowed
up
in night."
March, 1915, we received an invitation signed by Dutch, British and Belgian women to
In
an International Congress of Women to be held at The Hague, April 28 to May I, at which I was asked to preside. The Congress was designed as a protest against war, in which it was hoped
women from
tional
all nations would join. met of the signers at several viously
I had prethe Interna-
knew
letta
list.
I Suffrage Conference and elsewhere. them to be women of great courage and
ability,
had long warmly admired Dr. AlJacobs of Amsterdam, whose name led the
and
I
delegation of forty-seven
women from
the
WAR
13
United States accepted the invitation, most of them members of the new Women's Peace Party. All of the delegates were obliged to pay their own expenses, and to trust somewhat confidingly to the usefulness of the venture. We set sail for Holland in the middle of April, on the Dutch ship Noordam, in which we were almost the only passengers. We were thus able to use the salon for daily conferences and lectures on the history of the Peace Movement. As the ship, steadied by a loose cargo of wheat, calmly proceeded on her way, our spirits rose, and all went well until, withfour days of the date set for the opening of the Conference, the Noordam came to a standstill in the English Channel directly off the cliffs of
in
Dover, where we faintly heard booming of cannon, and saw air and marine craft of every con-
make and kind. The first English newscame on board informed us of the which papers sharp opposition to the holding of our Congress, lest it weaken the morale of the soldiers. We were called "Peacettes" and the enterprise loaded with ridicule of the sort with which we later beceivable
came only too the ship hung
familiar.
at
During the three days

tele-
anchor there was much
graphing to all the people of political influence whom any one of us knew in England and several
cables were sent to Washington. \Vhether due to these or not, the
Noordam
14
WAR
finally received
and we
permission to proceed on her way landed in Rotterdam two hours before the
opening of the Congress.

States were
egation. closed to
We from the United more fortunate than the English delThe North Sea had been declared
The Hague
all traffic the very day they were to start, and eighty-seven of them waited at a port during
the entire session of
Congress, first for boats and later for flying machines, neither of which ever came. Fortunately three English-
arrived earlier, and made a small but most able delegation from Great Britain. The delegates at the Congress represented twelve different countries; they were all suffragists and believers in the settlement of international disputes by pacific means. Belligerent as well as neutral nations were represented, with
women had
of
sometimes two thousand visitors in attendance, whom had paid an entrance fee but were not
all
al-
lowed
to participate in the deliberations. sessions were characterized by efficiency
The
and
scrupulous courtesy, not without a touch of digAll discussion nity, as became the solemn theme.
of the causes of the war and of its conduct was prohibited, but discussions on the terms of peace
and the possible prevention of future wars, were carried on with much intelligence and fervor.
Gradually
the
first
'the police,
who
filled
the galleries at
it
meetings, were withdrawn as
became

evident that there
WAR
15
was
to be
no disturbance or un-
toward excitement. A moment of great interest was the entrance of the two Belgian delegates,
who shook hands
delegation before they took their places beside them on the platform, dedicated to "a passionate human sympathy, not inconsistent with patriotism, but tran-
with the
German
scending
it."
All the
women from
countries in leaving
home
the belligerent to attend the Congress

test
had dared ridicule and every they had also met the supreme
conscience
sort of difficulty; of a woman's
differing with those loves in the hour of their deepest affliction.
of
whom
she
For
men
heat of war were at the best sceptical of the value of the Congress and many of them
in the
were actually hostile to it; in fact the delegates from one of the northern German cities were put in jail when they returned home, solely on th$ charge of having attended a Congress in which women from the enemy countries were sitting. A series of resolutions was very carefully drawn
as a result of the three days' deliberations.
committee, consisting of two
women from
each
country, called "The Women's International Committee for Permanent Peace," was organized and established headquarters at Amsterdam. At its last session, the Congress voted that
resolutions, especially the one
its
on a Conference of
Neutrals, should be carried by a delegation of
16
WAR
women from
belligerent
officials in
the neutral countries to the Premier
and Minister of Foreign Affairs of each of the countries, and by a delegation of women from the belligerent countries to the same
the neutral nations.
As
a result four-
May and June, 1915, by delegates from the Congress. As women, it was possible for us, from belligerent and neutral nations alike, to carry forward an
teen countries were visited in
of question and answer between which were barred to each other. Everywhere, save from one official in France, we heard the same opinion expressed by these men of the governments responsible for the promotion of the war; each one said that his country would be ready to stop the war immediately if some honorable method of securing peace were provided; each one
interchange
capitals
disclaimed responsibility for the continuance of the war; each one predicted European bankruptcy
if
the
war were prolonged, and each one grew pale

;
and distressed as he spoke of the loss of his gallant young countrymen two of them with ill-concealed emotion referred to the loss of their own sons. We heard much the same words spoken in Downing Street as those spoken in Wilhelmstrasse, in Vienna as -in Petrograd, in Budapest as in Havre, where the Belgians had their temporary government. "My country would not
find anything unfriendly in such action
by the neu~
WAR
17
trals," was the assurance given us by the Foreign minister of one of the great belligerents. "My Government would place no obstacle in the way
of
ing
its
institution," said the Minister of
an oppos-
nation.
"What
are
the
neutrals waiting
for?" said a third.
Our
for
a
confidence as to the feasibility of the plan Conference of Neutrals also increased.
are right," said one Minister, "it would be of the greatest importance to finish the fight by early negotiation rather than by further military
efforts,
"You
which will only result in more and more destruction and irreparable loss." "Yours is the sanest proposal that has been brought to this
office in
the last six months," said another Prime
Minister.
received by the following of the belligerent nations: representatives
The envoys were
Prime Minister Asquith and Foreign Minister Grey, in London. Reichskanzler von Bethmann-Hollweg, and Foreign Minister von Jagow, in Berlin. Prime Minister Stuergkh, Foreign Minister Burian, in Vienna; Prime Minister Tisza, in Budapest. Prime Minister Salandra and Foreign Minister
Sonino, in
Rome.
Prime Minister Viviani and Foreign Minister

Delcasse, in Paris.
Foreign Minister
d' Avignon, in
Havre.
i8

Foreign Minister Sasonoff,
in
WAR
Petrograd.
And
tral
by the following representatives of neu-
governments:
Prime Minister Cort van der Linden and ForThe Hague. Prime Minister Zahle and Foreign Minister Scavenius, in Copenhagen. King Haakon, Prime Minister Knudsen, Foreign Minister Ihlen, and by Messrs. Loevland, Asrstad Castberg and Jahren, the four presidents
eign Minister Loudon, in
of the Storthing in Christiania. Foreign Minister Wallenberg, in Stockholm. President Motta and Foreign Minister Hoffman, in Berne. President Wilson and Secretary of State Lansing in Washington.
Rome, the delegation went unofficially that is to say, without a mandate from the Congress, to an audience with the Pope and the
in
While
Cardinal Secretary of State. As I recall those hurried journeys which Alice Hamilton and I made with Dr. Alletta Jacobs and
her friend
Madame
Palthe to one warring country
seems marvelous to me that the people we met were so outspoken against war, with a freedom of expression which was not alafter another,
it still
lowed later
in
Among
the
there
certain
any of the belligerent nations. young men, such as those editing
Cam-Magazine in Cambridge University, was a veritable revolt against war and

against the old
WAR
19
it who, they on their own," in said, days intolerance and to hate, revenge withappealing out fear of contradiction from the younger gener-
men
responsible for
were "having
field
ation.
We
were impressed with the fact that
in all
countries the enthusiasm for continuing the war was largely fed on a fund of animosity growing
out of the conduct of the war; England on fire over the atrocities in Belgium, Germany indignant
over England's blockade to starve her women and children. It seemed to us in our naivete, al-
though it may be that we were not without a homely wisdom, that if the Press could be freed and an adequate offer of negotiations made, the war might be concluded before another
winter of the terrible trench warfare.
However,
the three "envoys" from the United States, Emily Balch, Alice Hamilton and myself, wrote out our
impressions as carefully as we were able in a little book, so that there is no use in repeating them
here.
Shortly after our return the delegates from Holland, England and Austria met with us in the
and we issued what we called a more the calling of a Neutral Conference and giving our reasons therefor. This document is long since forgotten, lost in the stirring events which followed, although at the
United
States,
manifesto, urging once
20
WAR
time it received a good deal of favorable comment, in the press of the neutral countries on both sides of the Atlantic, perhaps because it was
difficult
openly to oppose
tions.
We
its modest recommendawere certainly well within the truth
when we
said that "we bear evidence of a rising desire and intention of vast companies of people in the neutral countries to turn a barren disin-
terestedness into an active goodwill.
In Sweden,
for example,
in
more than 400 meetings were held

act.
one day
in different parts of the country, calling
on the government to
"The
rests
excruciating burden of responsibility for
the hopeless continuance of this war no longer on the will of the belligerent nations alone.
It rests also on the will of those neutral governments and people who have been spared its shock
but cannot, if they would, absolve themselves from their full share of responsibility for the continuance of war."
The
first
annual meeting of the
Women's Peace
Party was held at Washington in January, 1916. The reports showed that during the year mass meetings had been held all over the country, much material had been sent out from the central office
for speeches arranged for by other public bodies, and in addition to the state branches there were
one hundred and sixty-five group memberships, totaling about forty thousand women. In becom-
WAR
21
ing a section of the Women's International Committee for Permanent Peace we were securely committed to an international body which at that
time had well defined branches in fifteen countries.
Congressional program adopted at the annual meeting included measures to oppose universal, compulsory, military service; to secure a joint commission to deal with problems arising between the United States and the Orient; and to
The
shall be
formulate the principle that foreign investments made without claim to military protection.
The
third annual meeting
was held
at the
end
of eleven months, in December of 1916, again in Washington. The most important feature of it
was
on Oppressed and Dependent Nationalities, arranged by Miss Grace Abbott, one of our members, who had had long experience
a conference
as Superintendent of the
Immigrant Protective
League of Chicago.
The
attention to the fact that as
invitations to this special conference called Americans we be-
lieved that
good government is no substitute for self-government, and that a federal form offers the most satisfactory method of giving local selfgovernment
in a
country great in territory or comAmerica's international plex in population. or policies might support express these principles
How
was the problem before the conference.
It
was
believed that valuable advice could be given by
22
WAR
their
those citizens of the United States
who by
birth belonged to the dependent or oppressed nationalities and who, through their American "experience, were familiar with the workings of our federal form of government.
Prominent representatives of the Poles, Czechoslovaks, Lithuanians and Letts, Ukrainians, Jugoslavs, Albanians, Armenians, Zionists and Irish
speakers All the problems of conflicting claims and the creation of new subject minorities as a result of any territorial changes which
at the Conference.
Republicans were, for
this reason, the
might be made, were developed in the course of the Conference. Disagreement also developed as to the weight which should be given to historic claims in the righting of ancient wrongs in contrast to the
demands of a present population.
This experimental conference had behind it a very sound theory of the contribution which American experience might have made toward a reconciliation of European differences in advance of the meeting of the Peace Conference. Professor Masaryk, later President of Czecho-Slovakia, attempted to accomplish such an end in the
organization of the Central European nationali-
which actually came to a tentative agreement Philadelphia more than a year later. Had the federal form of government taken hold of the minds of the American representatives
ties,
in
BEGINNING OF THE GREAT WAR
23
of various nationalities as strongly as did the desire for self-determination, or had the latter been
coupled with an enthusiasm for federation, many of the difficulties inherent in the Peace Conference
would
among
have been anticipated. the succession states of Austria
federation
secured at the
minimum
would have Customs Union and

diffi-
might have averted the most galling economic

culties.
It
was
at this third annual
ton, the last
meeting in Washingheld before the United States en-
tered the war, that we discussed the inevitable shortage of food throughout the world which long-
continued
war
entailed.
For three years we,
like
many
the
States,
other sympathetic citizens of the United had been at times horribly oppressed with consciousness that widespread famine had
once more returned to the world. At moments there seemed to be no spot upon which to rest
one's
called Serbia,
mind with a sense of well being. One rewhere three-fourths of a million
people out of the total population of three million, had perished miserably of typhus and other diseases superinduced by long continued privations; Armenia, where in spite of her heart-breaking
history,
famine and pestilence had never stalked
so unchecked; Palestine, where the old horrors of the siege of Jerusalem, as described by Josephus,
had been revived and perhaps the crowning hor;
24

all,
WAR
ror of
so called by the Russians because it was easily traced by the continuous crosses raised over the hastily dug
the
"Way
of the Cross"
graves
beginning with the Galician thorough-
fares, and stretching south and east for fourteen hundred miles, upon which a distracted peasantry
ran breathlessly until stopped by the Caspian Sea, or crossed the Ural Mountains into Asia, only to come back again because there was no food there.
We pointed out in our speeches what later became commonplace statements on hundreds of platforms, that although there had been universal bad harvests in 1916, the war itself was primarily responsible for the increasing dearth of food. Forty million men were in active army service,
twenty million men and women were supporting the armies by their war activities, such as the manufacture of munitions, and perhaps as many
more were
building.
in definite
war
industries, such as shipall
Of
course, not
these people were
before the war directly engaged in producing food, but many of them were, and others were transporting or manufacturing it, and their
wholesale withdrawal wrought havoc both in agriculture
and
in industry.
fields,
The European
children and in certain sections by
worked by women and war prisoners,
were lacking in fertilizers which could not be brought from remote ports nor be manufactured

as usual in Europe, because nitrates materials essential to ammunition
WAR
25
and other such were being diconstantly de-
verted to that use.
The U-boats
stroyed food-carrying ships,
and many remote
markets had become absolutely isolated, so that they could no longer contribute their food supplies
to a
hungry Europe.
at the
Mr. Hoover,
lief
head of the American Re-
10,000,000 people in France, but at that time

in
Committee, was then feeding approximately Belgium and northern little more was attempted
Yet the feeding of civilian populations. thousands of Americans were already finding this
consciousness
of
starvation
among European
women and
children increasingly hard to bear.
CHAPTER II.
THE NEUTRAL CONFERENCE PLUS THE FORD
IN
the fall of 1915, after
SHIP.
we had
written our
so-called "Manifesto," a meeting of the Woman's York City, at Peace Party was called in
New
which we were obliged to make the discouraging

report that, in spite of the fact that the accredited officials of the leading belligerent nations, namely,
Great Britain, France, Russia, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Austria and Hungary, had expressed a willingness to cooperate in a Neutral Conference, and while the neutral nations, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Holland had been eager to participate in the proposed conference
if
it
could be
called by the United States, our own country was most reluctant. There seemed to us then to be two reasons for this reluctance; first that the United States could not call a neutral conference and ignore the South American countries, although to include even the largest of them would make too large a body, and secondly, that as the Central Powers had at that moment the technical
military advantage, such a conference,

at
all,
if
convened
should not be
summoned
26
until the military
THE NEUTRAL CONFERENCE

situation was more we had adequately
27
balanced.
We
thought that
replied to both of these ob-
jections, but because of
them or for other reasons President Wilson would not consider the proposition, nor was his attitude in the least changed later when one of our members came from a small
European neutral country with the accredited proposition that her nation would call such a conference
if it
could be assured of the participation

to an impasse there-
of the United States.
We
seemed to have come
concerned unless
fore, so far as calling a conference of neutrals was we could bring to bear a tremen-
dous pressure of public opinion upon the officials in Washington. The newspapers were, of course, closed to us so far as seriously advocating such a conference was concerned, although they were only too ready to seize upon any pretext which made might make the effort appear absurd. one more attempt to induce the President to act, an attempt made possible through the generosity of Mrs. Henry Ford. She sent us a contribution of
We
$5,000.00 which she afterwards increased to $8,000.00 and the entire sum was spent upon tele-
grams issued from New York and Chicago to eight thousand women, every one of whom was either the chairman or secretary of a woman's
organization, asking her to urge the President to call a conference of neutrals as an attempt to end
28
WAR
the slaughter in Europe. These women's organizations included mutual benefit societies, all
sorts of
Church organizations, women's clubs and
many
The telegrams we sent averaged $1.00 each. Of course we did not pay for the telegrams which we asked should be sent to President Wilson. He received about two thousand more than the number of our requests; they
others.
in cost
poured
office in
in at such a rate for three
days that the

to engage
Washington was obliged
two
extra clerks
who doubtless possessed the only pairs of eyes which ever saw the telegrams. Neverthe-
less,
ten thousand women's organizations had learned that there was a project for a conference of neutrals and they had for a moment at least the
comfort of knowing that a suggestion was being made which might result in arresting the bloodshed.
At
this time
an unexpected development gave
the conference of neutrals only too much publicity and produced a season of great hilarity for the
newspaper men of two continents. Madame Rosika Schwimmer, who still remained in the United States, had lectured in Detroit where she had been introduced to Mr. Henry Ford. For many months Mr. Ford had maintained a personal representative in Washington to keep him informed
of possible openings for making peace with the understanding that such efforts "should not be

mere
29
talk nor education." During a long interview which Madame Schwimmer held with Mr. Ford and his wife, he expressed his willingness to finance the plan of a neutral conference and promised to meet her in New York in regard to
it.
He
arrived in
New York the very day the conmoment

our efforts had
ference of the
Women's Peace Party adjourned and he met with a small committee the same eve-
ning.
Up
to that
all
been bent towards securing a conference supported by neutral governments who should send representatives to the body; but as it gradually became clear that the governments would not act, we hoped that a sum large enough to defray all the general expenses of such a conference might initiate it as a private enterprise.
It is easy to forget the state of the public
mind
year of the great war. At said in regard to the unboth to "dig in" for another of sides willingness winter of trench warfare, and a statement was constantly repeated that, on the western front alone during an average day when no military position had been changed, the loss was still three
at the
end of the
first
that
moment much was
thousand men. We knew how concerned the responsible statesmen in each country were about this destruction of young life, and there were
many proofs
that the very sense of
modern
effi-
ciency so carefully fostered in one industrial coun-
30

was
WAR
try after another,
steadily being outraged.
The first Christmas of the war the Pope had made a touching, although futile appeal for a
it might be possible that as the second Christmas approached, men's minds would be open to a proposition looking towards
cessation of hostilities;
the gradual substitution of adjudication for military methods. It is very difficult after five years
of war to recall the attitude of most normal people during those first years. Such people had not
yet acknowledged the necessity and propriety of war, their mental processes were not yet so inhibited but that
it
many of them still believed that be might possible to clarify the atmosphere, and to find a way out of the desperate situation in
which Europe found itself. At least the beginnings of a solution might be found by the constant exercise of such judgment as carefully selected men from the neutral countries might be able to bring to bear. Such a conference sitting continuously would take up one possibility after another for beginning peace negotiations. It was further hoped by the most sanguine that such a conference,
if
successful,
might undertake the interna-
tional administration of the territory conquered by either side until its final disposition was deter-
mined upon; thus the

to
it
allied side
would turn over
the
German
colonies in South Africa, the
Central Powers such parts of Belgium and North-
31
ern France as they then occupied, and Russia the portions of Galicia she was then holding. At the
end of the war there would be in actual operation an international body similar to that constituted at Algeciras or to that since advocated by the League of Nations in regard to the determination of mandates. It would be developed into the beginnings
It might of the both on sides bring hope conflict who were confessedly fighting on doggedly day after day because they saw no one able to detach them from it. There were thousands of "loyal" Americans who in 1915 sincerely wished to see the carnage stopped and Europe
of a de facto international government.

to certain soldiers
once more reconstructed; they knew that the longer the war lasted the harder it would be to
make peace and

amazed
men,
that each
month of war
inevitably
states-
tended to involve more nations.

at the futile efforts of
They were
European
at their willingness and at moments their apparent eagerness to hand their functions over
conceivably be changed. Many people went about day after day with an oppressive sense of the horrible disaster which had befallen the world and woke up
times during the night as from a hideous nightmare. Men must have felt like this during the time of pestilence, in the fourteenth century
to military men, as inevitable of
and
at their craven acceptance
much which might
many
32
WAR
for instance, when the bubonic plague destroyed about thirty-five million people in Europe, and no
determined and intelligent effort was made to stop The youth in many of the belligerent countries had been sent to war by men put in office through slight majorities won in elections based upon pureYet here they were at the bely domestic issues. hest and determination of the men thus elected, often against their own convictions and instincts, ranged against each other in long-drawn battle with but one inevitable issue. There must be a residuum of kindliness and good sense somewhere in the world! It was customary at that time to ask the opponent of war what he would have done had he been in France when the German war machine threatened her very existence. We could only reply that we were not criticizing France, that we had every admiration for her gallant courit.
age, but that what we were urging at that moment was the cessation of hostilities and the substitution of another
method.
Was a group of men
living in Prussia,
the development and perfection of a military machine which, from the very nature of the case must in the course
who had urged
of time be put into operation, to be allowed to determine the future of all the young men in
not the system of conscription, spread to England and her colonies overseas, but increase the practice of militarism?
Europe?
Would

Our hopes were high as we talked over the
that evening in
possible
33
New York
a
men and
women from
the Scandinavian countries,
few from
Holland and Switzerland, who possessed the international mind and might lend themselves to the plan of a neutral conference. We were quite worldly enough to see that we should have to begin with some well-known Americans, but we were confident that at least a half dozen of them with whom we had already discussed the plan, would be
ready to go.
to
Mr. Ford took
a night train to
meet an appointment with PresiWashington dent Wilson, perhaps still hoping that the plan might receive some governmental sanction and
at least wishing to be assured that, as a private enterprise, it would not embarrass the government.
During the day, as I went about New York in the interest of other affairs and as yet saying nothing of the new plan, it seemed to me that perhaps it was in character that the effort from the United
States should be initiated not by the government but by a self-made business man who approached the situation from a purely human point of view, almost as a working man would have done. On
the evening after his return from Washington Mr. Ford reported that the President had declared
him
conference and had wished

prise.
quite within his rights in financing a neutral all success to the enter-
34

The
difficulties,
WAR
however, began that very eve-
ning when Mr. Ford asked his business agent to show us the papers which chartered the Nor-
wegian boat Oscar II for her next trans-Atlantic voyage. Some of the people attending the committee meeting evidently knew of this plan, but I was at once alarmed, insisting that it would be
easy enough for the

to travel to
members of
the conference
Stockholm or The Hague by various steamship lines, paying their own expenses; that we needed Mr. Ford's help primarily in organizing a conference but not in transporting the peoMr. Ford's response was to the effect that ple. the
more
publicity the better
and that the
sailing
of the ship itself would make known the conference more effectively than any other method could
possibly do.
After that affairs moved rapidly. Mr. Louis Lochner came on from Chicago to act
as secretary to the undertaking, which lished with its own headquarters in
was
estab-
mittee
attempt the very first who should be responsible for selecting the personnel of the conference proved difficult. Mr.
An
York. to a comday organize
New
Ford himself was eager to issue the invitations and had begun with two of his oldest and best friends,
John Burroughs and Thomas A. Edison. At the very first, a group of college young people presented a list of students, limited to two from each of the leading colleges and universities whom they

wished to have
35
invited. pointed out that these could hardly hope to be of direct value to the conference itself, but it was hard to set aside the
We
reply that
what was needed was not only
efforts
at adjudication by a well-considered conference of elders but also the warmth and reassurance
which youth would bring to the enterprise.

advocates
also
The
their
youthful demonstration might evoke a compunction among the elderly statesmen responsible for the war who, by calling any such remonstrance treason, had ab-
believed
that
solutely inhibited pacifist youth in Europe from expression of opinion. There was also much feel-
ing at the
moment among certain
students in
Amer-
of the Cambridge
ican universities over the suppression in England Magazine whose editorial policy
had been consistently

sign
anti-military, and over the fact that Bertrand Russell had been asked to re-
from Cambridge University. college group was finally invited and later proved a somewhat embarrassing factor in the enterprise. I left for Chicago before the flood of invitations were sent; many of them were addressed to honest, devoted, and also distinguished
people, although the offer of a crusading journey to Europe with all expenses paid could but attract many fanatical and impecunious reformers.
Almost immediately upon
my
return to Chi-
cago, ten days before the Oscar II sailed, the
36
WAR
newspaper accounts from New York began to be most disquieting. We had not expected any actual cooperation from the newspapers, but making all allowances for that, the enterprise seemed
to be exhibiting unfortunate aspects.
The
con-
ference
itself
was seldom mentioned, but the
journey and the ship were made all important and mysterious people with whom Madame Schwim-
mer was
said to be in communication,
were con-
stantly featured. The day when Mr. Ford's slogan "Get the Boys out of the trenches by Christ-
mas" was spread
all
over the front pages of the
dailies I spent large
sums of money telephoning
to the secretary in New York begging him to keep to the enterprise in hand, which I reminded him
was
the conference of neutrals.
Having so
re-
cently traveled in Europe under wartime regulations, I knew that such propaganda would be considered treasonable and put the enterprise in a
very dangerous position. Mr. Lochner reminded me of Mr. Ford's well-known belief that direct appeal to the "the boys" was worth much more than the roundabout educational methods we were
advocating. Almost simultaneously with this untoward development the secretary received the
leading internationalists who had seriously considered going, and of two others who had but recently accepted. They had
resignations
all
of
three
been convinced of the possible usefulness of
37
a conference of neutrals, at least to the extent of
giving "continuous mediation" a trial, but they had become absolutely disconcerted by the ex-
traneous developments of the enterprise. On the other hand, the people in New York in charge of the enterprise believed that the anti-war move-
ment throughout its history had been too quietistic and much too grey and negative; that the heroic aspect of life had been too completely handed over to war, leaving pacifists under the suspicion that they cared for safety first and cherished survival above
all else
;
that a demonstration
was needed, even
a spectacular one to show that ardor and comradeship were exhibited by the non-
militarists as well; in fact, it
who
glorious an adventure that the youth of one nation had no right to deprive the youth of another nation of
believed that
life itself
was was so
the pacifists
their share in
it;
that living
itself,
which
so
all
youth
had
than
I
in
common, was larger and more

nationalistic
inclusive
the
differences
unfairly
stressed by their elders.
years old in 1915 I had already life," to use Dante's great phrase, that moral results are often obtained through the
fifty-five
;
was
"learned from
most unexpected agencies; that
it is very easy to an the value of misjudge undertaking by a critical or unfair estimate of the temperament and
ability of those
undertaking
it.
It
was
quite pos-
38

with
WAR
sible that
the
Mr. Ford's personal knowledge of rank and file of working men he had shrewdly
interpreted the situation, that he understood the soldier who was least responsible for the war and
could refuse to continue only

simultaneously to both sides. diers in every army are men
the appeal came The bulk of the solif
who
ordinarily
work
and been We had told, only the month before, of the response on the part of the English soldiers when governmental officials had been sent to France to go through the trenches in order to find skilled mechanics to work in the arsenals and munition factories which had been found to be such an important factor in modern warfare.
with their hands
in agriculture.
in industry, in transportation
eagerly the men confessed, when there was no question of lack of patriotism involved, that they had longed for the feel of tools in their
How
hands, that they had felt disconnected and unhappy. Possibly what Mr. Veblen calls "the instinct of
workmanship" asserted
itself in
mute but
powerful rebellion through their very muscles and nerves against the work of destruction to which their skilled hands were set. Was the appeal more natural and Mr. Ford which was making normal, more fitted to the situation than that which we had so eagerly been advocating? At
any rate the situation was taken quite out of the hands of the original promoters, for among other

things which
39
Mr. Ford had gained from his wide an overwhelming belief in the was experience value of advertising; even derision was better
than no "story" at all. Partly in pursuance of because they themselves were clamorous, no fewer than sixty-four newspaper
this policy, partly
men
finally sailed
on the Oscar
II.
During the days of my preparation for the journey, which was largely an assembling of warm clothing, for there was little fuel in the Scandinavian countries even then and we were to land
in
December, I tried to make my position clear to remonstrating friends. Admitting the plan had fallen into the hands of Mr. Ford who had long
taken an inexplicable position in regard to peace propaganda, and that with many notable .exceptions, a group of very eccentric people had attached themselves to the enterprise, so that there was every chance for a fiasco, I still felt committed to it and believed that at the worst it would be a protest from the rank and file of America, young and old, learned and simple, against the continuation of the war which in Europe was more and more being then regarded as inevitable. I was so convinced of the essential soundness of the conference of neutrals and so confident of Euro-
pean participation, that I was inclined to consider the sensational and unfortunate journey of the
American contingent
as a
mere incident
to the
40
WAR
undertaking, for after all the actual foundations of the conference itself would have to be laid on
It became clearer became associated with much ridicule and social but that of course seemed a small opprobrium, to for a protest against war. Even in pay price much Mr. Ford's repeated slogan to "come out of the trenches" there was a touch of what might be called the Christian method, "cease to do evil," you yourself, just where you are, whatever the heads of the church and state may dictate. Whole
the other side of the Atlantic.
every day that whoever the ship would be in for
pages of Tolstoy's reaction to the simple Christian teaching raced through my mind; was this slogan a slangy 2Oth century version of the same
decisive appeal?
the enterprise would become part of it, is of course impossible to state, for on the eve of leaving home, a serious malady which had pursued me from childhood reappeared and I was lying in a hospital bed in Chicago not only during the voyage of the Oscar II, but during the following weeks when the Neutral Conference was ac-
What my interpretation of
I
have been, had
tually established in Stockholm. It is useless to speculate on
what might have
occurred at various times but for our physical limitations; we must, perforce, accommodate ourselves to them, and it is never easy, although I
41
had had the training which comes to a child with "spinal disease," as it was called in my youth. Madame Schwimmer, who, as a journalist and suffrage organizer, had had wide experience in many European countries outside of Hungary, was convinced that the neutral conference would not succeed unless it had back of it the imaginative
interest of the
common people throughout Europe. She therefore arranged that formal receptions should be accorded to the party in the four neutral countries of Norway, Sweden, Denmark and HolThe
it,
land.
ducted
was
entire expedition, so far as she conin the grand manner for she be-
lieved, rightly or wrongly, that the
drooping Peace
the prestige and reassurance that such a policy would bring to it. Unfortunately the policy exposed her both to the charge of
Movement needed
extravagance
claque.
Difficulties
and
of
having
manufactured
developed during the journey; Mr.

in
Ford
left a
in
few days after the group arrived

and
Norway,
sentations
the midst of journalistic misrepre-
Madame Schwimmer
resigned
from the Conference, during the early months of But in spite of disasters the Neuits existence. tral Conference was finally set up at Stockholm, on January 26, 1916, after the Burgomaster of the city had introduced an interpellation in the Rikstag, of which he was a member, asking the
42

its
WAR
Swedish Government to define

tral mediation.
attitude on neu-
Gradually the personnel was completed by five representatives each from Denmark, Holland,
Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, with three from Among the Europeans were Professors of International Law, of Economics, of Philosophy, the legal advisor to the Nobel Institute, men and women who were officers of National Peace Societies, members of Parliament and
the United States.
issued a carefully considered appeal addressed "To the Governments and Parliaments of the Neutral Nations reprecity officials.
They
first
sented at the second
Hague Conference" begging

and quoting from
that such an
to
them
to offer official mediation,
The Hague Conventions
show
offer could not be construed as an unfriendly act.
This appeal was given general publicity by the European Press, even in the belligerent countries, and at least served to draw attention once more
to the fact that a continuation of the
war was not
necessarily inevitable.
Resolutions based on the
appeal were considered by three National Parliaments, and the appeal itself was discussed at a formal meeting of the Prime Ministers of the
three Scandinavian countries.
At
Easter, 1916, the Conference issued an ap-
peal to "The Governments, Parliaments and People of Belligerent Nations." This was the result

of
43
intelli-
much
gent
effort
study, to
and was founded upon an

obtain
the
various nationalistic
points of view. An enormous correspondence on the subject had taken place, and representatives of many nationalities had appeared before the
Conference; these ranged from the accredited governmental officials to the Esthonian peasant
who came on
skiis,
many
miles over the
ice
and
snow, crossing the frontier at the risk of his life, not daring even to tell his name, and wishing the
bare fact of his appearance to be suppressed, until he should have had time to return to his own
He added one more to the tragic peticountry. This tions, received from all parts of Europe. official appeal to the belligerent nations, foreshadowing the famous fourteen
published.
points,
was
also widely
The Conference of Neutrals, reorganized into an International Commission devoted to promoting the public opinion necessary for a lasting peace
whenever the governments should be ready to act, had much to do with stimulating general meetings held in all the neutral countries on Hague Day, May 1 8th, and again on the second anniversary of the war in August. George Brandes of Denmark, wrote a stirring appeal for Peace, as did the poets and writers of various countries, including Ellen Key and Selma Lagerlof. For the
moment
demand
for the cessation of the
war
be-
44
WAR
came vocal, at least in those countries where such demands were not officially suppressed.
Because the beginning of actual mediation, founded upon visits between citizens from the belligerent nations with those from the neutral must of necessity be conducted quietly, the Conference finally left two of its members in each of the five
neutral countries, with its headquarters at The Hague, where the two delegates from the United States were established.
When
Louis Lochner came back to the United
States in October, 1916, he was able to give an He arrived in the midst of enthusiastic report.
the "he kept us out of
war" Presidential campaign.

in
The Democratic Party
the very convention
which re-nominated President Wilson and drew the Party Platform, had endorsed a League of Nations policy. Mr. Lochner reported that even the Germans were ready for international disarmament, and that the question on everybody's We were lips was "how soon will Wilson act?" that in sure Mr. Wilson would act his own best way, and were most anxious not to take the attitude towards him by which the Abolitionist so constantly embarrassed President Lincoln during
the Civil
that time was guaranteeing to the Conference a steady income of ten thousand dollars a month, the first difficulties had subsided
War. Mr. Ford at
45
and the movement was constantly gaining prestige. The Norway delegation, for instance, then conLange, general secretary of the Interparliamentary Union; Dr. Horgenstierne, president of the University of Christiania, and
sisting of Christian
Haakon Loeken,
countries.
state's attorney for Christiania.
This personnel was not unlike that of the other
On December 10, 1916, President Wilson issued his famous Peace Note, and it seemed as if
at last the
world were breathing another
air.
For
the time being the pacifists were almost popular, or at least felt a momentary lift of the curious
strain
which inevitably comes to him
who
finds
himself differing with every one about him. In January of 1917, Mr. Lochner returned
again to the United States in company with the
man who had
been engaged in negotiations with Great Britain, and saw the President twice. I was ill and confined to my room at this time. But in a long conversation which I had with Mr. Lochner in Chicago, as he reported recent interviews with Mr. Ford and his secretaries, it was evident
that the benefactor of the Neutral Conference
reflecting the
was
like
change
in public opinion,
and
many another
war
tion
as such,
pacifist,
who
does not believe in
was nevertheless making an excepIn February Mr. Ford's He anwas unmistakable.
of "this war."
position
changed
46
WAR
nounced that he would give no more support to the European undertaking after March first, and he withdrew from the Neutral Conference plan
almost as abruptly as he had entered it. Thus came to an end all our hopes for a Conference of Neutrals devoted to continuous mediation.
organizations as such had had nothdo with the "Ford Ship," but of course we had assiduously urged the Conference which it was designed to serve, and our members in many counCertries had promoted the de facto Conference. us no one could with "passivtainly justly charge
ing to
ity" in
Our women's
our efforts to secure
it.
During
my long days of
invalidism in California
the following spring, I had plenty of time to analyze the situation. Had we been over-persistent,
so eager for the grapes that
gather
thistles,
had
willing to our identification with the
we were
sensational Peace Ship been an exhibition of moral daring or merely an example of woeful lack of
judgment?
When
I contrasted the
Ford under-
taking with another International Peace
Move-
from any sensationalism, I found that the latter had been scarcely more sucThe Minimum Program Committee had cessful been supported by pacifists from many countries. It was inaugurated in the spring of 1915 at a con-
ment absolutely
:
free
ference
composed of distinguished men and women held at The Hague, where it established perman-
47
ent headquarters. It had put forward a rational program, and had kept alive the hopes for an ordered world, functioning throughout the war and for two years following with no act of indiscretion.
It
New York
was, in fact, so cautious that at a dinner in which I attended as a member of the
American Committee of 100, certain officers, alarmed at the remote connection with the Ford Ship which Mr. Lochner's presence there indiTo them, as to so cated, asked him to resign.
many
millions of their fellow citizens, the slogan that "this is a war to end war" and the hope that
Commission would provide for an enduring peace, were convincing. They did not realthe Peace
ize
it
how
old the slogan was, nor

into
how many
times
condoning war. California also afforded time for reading books in which it was easy to discover that never had so much been said about bringing war to an end forevermore, as by the group of Allied Nations
had lured men
who waged the last campaign against Napoleon. They declared in the grandiloquent phrases they
used so easily that their aims were "the reconstruction of the moral order," "a regeneration of
the political system of Europe," and "the establishment of an enduring peace founded upon a just redistribution of political forces." But Napoleon
was "crushed" and none of

fulfilled.
their
moral hopes were
They
too were faced at the end of the
48
WAR
war, as are the victors and vanquished of every war, by unimaginable suffering, by economic ruin, by the irreparable loss of thousands of young men,
by the
set
back of orderly progress.
incredibly continued year after year, as the entrance of one nation after another increased the number of young combatants,
As
the Great
War
war propaganda grew ever more bitter and were moments when we were acfor every kind of effort we had tually grateful made. At such times, the consciousness of social opprobrium, of having become an easy mark for
as the
irrational, there
the cheapest comment, even the sense of frustra-
bear than would have been the consciousness that in our fear of sensationalism we had left one stone unturned to
tion were, I
certain, easier to
am
secure the Conference of Neutrals which seemed

at least to us a possible agency for shortening the
conflict.
CHAPTER
III.
PRESIDENT WILSON'S POLICIES AND THE WOMEN'S PEACE PARTY
WE
heard with much enthusiasm the able and
discriminating annual message delivered by the President in December, 1915. It seemed to lay clearly before the country "the American strategy"
which the President evidently meant to carry out; he had called for a negotiated peace in order to save both sides from utter exhaustion and moral disaster in the end. We were all disappointed that when he asked for a statement of war aims both sides were reluctant to respond, but Germany's flat refusal put her at an enormous disadvantage and
enabled the President in his role of leading neutral to appeal to the German people over the
heads of their rulers with terms so liberal that it was hoped that the people themselves would force an end to the war. Naturally, a plea for a negotiated peace could only be addressed to the liberals throughout the world, who were probably
to be found in every country involved in the conIf the strategy had succeeded these liberals flict.
would have come
into
power
49
in all the
parliamen-
50
WAR
tary countries and the making of the peace as well as the organization of the international body to be formed after the war, would naturally have
been
self
in liberal
hands.
The peace
conference
it-
by
inevitably have been presided over the President of the great neutral nation who
would
had forced the issue. All this in sharp contrast to what would result if the United States, with its enormous resources, entered into the war, for if the war were carried on to a smashing victory, the "bitter enders" would inevitably be in power
at
its
conclusion.
also counted
war had challenged
fact that this great the validity of the existing status between nations, as it had never been ques-
We
upon the
tioned before, and that radical changes were being proposed by the most conservative of men every-
where.
As
conceived by the
pacifist,
the construcat that
tive task laid
upon the United States
mo-
ment was
the discovery of an adequate moral basis for a new relationship between nations. The
exercise of the highest political intelligence might hasten to a speedy completion for immediate use
that international organization which had been so long discussed and so ardently anticipated.
Pacifists believed that in the
certain
Europe of 1914* tendencies were steadily pushing towards
large changes which in the end made war, because the system of peace had no way of effecting those
PRESIDENT WILSON'S POLICIES
51
changes without war, no adequate international organization which could cope with the situation.
The
conception of peace founded upon the balance of power or the undisturbed status quo, was so
negative that frustrated national impulses and suppressed vital forces led to war, because no method of orderly expression had been devised.
The world was bent on a change, for it knew that the real denial and surrender of life is not
physical death but acquiescence in hampered conditions and unsolved problems. Agreeing substantially with this analysis of the causes of the
war,
we
pacifists, so far
from passively wishing

on the contrary
nothing to be done, contended
that this world crisis should be utilized for the
creation of an international government able to make the necessary political and economic changes
which were due; we
felt
that
it
was unspeakably
stupid that the nations should fail to create an international organization through which each one,
without danger to
itself, might recognize and even the encourage impulse toward growth in other nations.
In spite of
many
assertions to the contrary,
we
were not advocating the mid- Victorian idea that good men from every country meet together at
The Hague
tion that
or elsewhere, there to pass a resolu-
"wars hereby cease" and that "the world be federated." What we insisted upon hereby
52
WAR
was
that the world could be organized politically by its statesmen as it had been already organized into an international fiscal system by its bankers.
We
the problem of building a railroad to Bagdad, of securing corridors to the sea for a land-locked nation, or warm water harbors for
asked
why
Russia, should result in war. Surely the minds of this generation were capable of solving such problems as the minds of other generations had
solved their difficult problems. Was it not obvious that such situations transcended national
boundaries and must be approached in a spirit of world adjustment, that they could not be peacefully adjusted while
men's minds were
still
held
apart by national suspicions and rivalries. The pacifists hoped that the United States
might perform a much needed service in the international field, by demonstrating that the same principles of federation and of an interstate tribunal might be extended
nations, as they
among widely separated

established be-
had already been
tween our own contiguous states. Founded upon the great historical experiment of the United States, it seemed to us that American patriotism
might
rise to a
supreme
effort
because her
own
experience for
more than
a century
had
so thor-
oughly committed her to federation and to peaceful adjudication as matters of every-day government. The President's speech before the Senate
53
embodied such a masterly restatement of early American principles that thousands of his fellow citizens dedicated themselves anew to finding a method for applying them in the wider and more
difficult field
of international relationships.
We
were stirred to enthusiasm by certain indications that President Wilson was preparing for this difficult piece of American strategy.
It was early in January, 1916, that the President put forth his Pan-American program before
the Pan-American Scientific Congress which was held in Washington at that time. His first point,
"to unite in guaranteeing to each other absolute
independence and territorial integrity" was not so significant to us as the second, "to setpolitical
tion
disputes arising between us by investigaand arbitration." One of our members had been prominently identified with this Congress. I had addressed its Woman's Auxiliary and at our Executive Comtle all
mittee meeting, held in January, 1916, we felt that we had a right to consider the Administration
committed still further to the path of arbitration upon which it had entered in September, 1914, when treaties had been signed in Washington with Great Britain, France, Spain and China, each providing for commissions of inquiry in cases of difficulty.
Secretary Bryan that twenty-six nations
had stated at that time had already signed such
54
WAR
treaties, and that Russia, Germany and Austria were being urged to do so. Then there had been the President's Mexican policy which, in spite of great pressure had kept the United States free from military intervention, and had been marked by great forebearance to a sister republic which as yet was struggling awkwardly toward self-gov-
ernment.
But it was still early in 1916 that the curious and glaring difference between the President's statement of foreign policy and the actual bent of
the Administration began to appear. In the treaty with Haiti, ratified by the United States Senate in February, 1916, the United States guaranteed Haiti territorial and political independence and
in turn
was empowered to administer Haiti's cusUnited toms and finances for twenty years. States Marines, however, had occupied Haiti since a riot which had taken place in 1915 and had set
a strict mili-
up a military government, including
tary censorship. ing the office of the Woman's Peace Party, some of them from white men wearing the United
All sorts of stories were reach-
some of them from black men in the over treatment accorded to the island despair "armed invaders." We made our protest to by
States' uniform,
Washington, Miss Breckenridge presenting the protest in person after she had made a most careful investigation into all the records to be found

in the possession
55
She reof the government. do to with a ceived a most evasive reply having naval base which the United States had established there in preference to allowing France or
do so. In response to our suggestion that the whole matter be referred to the Central American Court we were told that the Court was no longer functioning, and a little later indeed the Carnegie building itself was dismantled, thus putting an end to one of the most promising
Germany
to
beginnings of international arbitration. In February, 1916, came the Nicaraguan treaty including among other things the payment of $3,-
000,000 for a naval base, seemingly in contradiction to the President's former stand in regard to Panama Canal tolls and the fortification of the
Canal.
Again the information given
in
response
to the inquiry of the
Woman's Peace Party was
fragmentary and again responsibility seemed to be divided between several departments of the government.
In the late
summer of
the
the purchase of the Virgin Islands

to this sale but none
same year there came from Denmark.

regard
A plebiscite had been taken in Denmark in

was
to be taken
on the islands
themselves that the people living there might say whether or not they wished to be transferred. When the Woman's Peace Party urged such a plebiscite, we were told that there was no doubt
56
WAR
that the Virgin Islands people did wish such a transfer, but there was no reply to our contention
would make it all the easier therefore, to take the vote, and that the situation offered a wonderful opportunity actually to put into practice on a small scale what the President himself would shortly ask Europe to do on a large scale. This opportunity, of course, was never utilized and thousands of people were transferred from one
that
it
government to another without a formal expression of their wishes.
In November, 1916, military occupation of the San Dominican Republic was proclaimed by Captain Knapp of the United States Navy and a military government was established there under control of the United States. Again we made our a but this time matter of form, having as protest
little
hope of a satisfactory reply although we
were always received with much official courtesy. We were quite ready to admit that the government was pursuing a consistent policy in regard
to the control of the Caribbean Sea, but we not only felt the danger of using the hunt for naval
bases as an excuse to subdue one revolution after
another and to set up military government, but also very much dreaded the consequences of such
a line of action
States in
its
upon the policy of the United
larger international relationships. each other and once when the occasion ofto said
We
fered, to the President himself, that to reduce the theory to action was the only way to attract
the attention of a world at war;
Europe would
be convinced of the sincerity of the United States only if the President was himself actually carrying out his announced program in the Caribbean
or wherever opportunity offered.
Out of
the long
international struggle had arisen a moral problem the solution of which could only be suggested
through some imperative act which would arrest attention as a mere statement could not possibly
seemed to us at moments as if the President were imprisoned in his own spacious intellectuality, and had forgotten the overwhelming
do.
It
value of the deed.
Up
to the
moment
of his nomination for a sec-
belief that the President
ond term our hopes had gradually shifted to the would finally act, not so much from his own preferences or convictions, but from the impact upon him of public opinion, from
the momentum of the pressure for Peace, which we were sure the campaign itself would make clear to him. I was too ill at that time for much campaigning but knew quite well that my vote could but go to the man who had been so essentially
right in international affairs. I held to this position through many spirited talks with Progressive
friends
best}
who
felt that
our mutual hopes could be
secured through other 'parties,
and as
58

better,
WAR
grew
mum of
and was able to undertake a minispeaking and writing, it was all for President Wilson's reelection and for an organization of a League of Nations. My feeble efforts were
recognized beyond their desert when, after the
November I was invited to a House dinner White tendered to a few people who had been the President's steadfast friends. The results of the campaign had been very It gratifying to the members of our group. seemed at last as if peace were assured and the
successful issue in
future safe in the hands of a chief executive
who
had received an unequivocal mandate from the

people "to keep us out of war."
sure, at
We
were, to be
moments a little uneasy in regard to his of theory self-government, a theory which had reappeared
in his
campaign speeches and was so

It
similar to that found in his earlier books.
seemed at those times as if he were not so eager for a mandate to carry out the will of the people
as for
an opportunity to lead the people
whither judgment their best interest lay. Did he place too much stress on leadership? But moments of uneasiness were forgotten and the pacifists in every part of the world were not
in his
only enormously reassured but were sent up into the very heaven of internationalism, as it were,
when President Wilson

speech to
delivered
the Senate in January,
famous 1917, which

his

forecast
his
59
Some of these points had, of course, become common property among Liberals since the first year of the war when they had been formulated by The League
fourteen
points.
for Democratic Control in England and later
became known
program. Our WomCongress held at The Hague in May, 1915, had incorporated most of the English formula and had added others. The President himself had been kind enough to say when I presented our Hague program to him in August, 1915, that they were the best formulation he had
as a "union"
an's International
seen up to that time. President Wilson, however, later not only gathered together the best liberal statements yet made,
formulated them
in his
incomparable English and
added others of his own, but he was the first responsible statesman to enunciate them as an actual
program for guidance
in a troubled
world.
Among the thousands of congratulatory telegrams received by the President at that time none could
have been more enthusiastic than those sent offih. cially and personally by the members of our little! group. We considered that the United States was \ committed not only to using its vast neutral power \ to extend democracy throughout the world, but also to the conviction that democratic ends could |
not be attained through the technique of war. In short, we believed that rational thinking and rea-
60

human
recognized as valid
WAR
sonable
licly
relationships were once more pubin international affairs.
If,
it
after the declaration of his foreign policy,
seemed to our group that desire and achievement were united in one able protagonist, the philosopher become king, so to speak^ this state of mind was destined to be short lived, for almost
immediately the persistent tendency of the President to divorce his theory from the actual conduct
of state affairs threw us into a state of absolute
bewilderment.
During a speaking tour in January, 1917, he called attention to the need of a greater army, and in St. Louis openly declared that the United States should have the biggest
in the
navy
in
world.
in despair a
We
were
few weeks
later
when
Washington
the President himself led the Pre-
paredness parade and thus publicly seized the leadership of the movement which had been
started and pushed by his opponents. It was an able political move if he believed that the United
European conflict through orthodox warfare, but he had given his friends every right to suppose that he meant to treat the situation through a much bolder and at the same time more subtle method. The question with us was not one of national isolation, although we were constantly told that this was the alternative to war, it was purely a question of the method the
States should enter the
United States should take to enter into a world The crisis, it seemed to us, offered a situation. test of the vigor and originality of a nation whose very foundations were laid upon a willingness to
experiment.
at this time that another disconcerting factor in the situation made itself felt; a factor
It
was
which
tuals."
was
brilliantly
analyzed
in
Randolph
Bourne's article entitled
"War and
the Intellec-
The
article
was
"unanimity with which their support to the use of war techin the crisis in which America found hernique self," and against "the riveting of the war mind
a protest against the the American intellectuals
had thrown
hundred million more of the world's peoseemed as if certain intellectuals, editors, ple." professors, clergymen, were energetically pushing forward the war against the hesitation and dim perception of the mass of the pople. They " seemed actually to believe that a war free from
upon
It
any taint of self-seeking could secure the triumph of democracy and internationalize the world." They extolled the President as a great moral
leader because he was irrevocably leading the country into war. The long established peace societies
orthodox organs quickly fell into line expounding the doctrine that the world's greatest war was to make an end to all wars. It was hard for some of us to understand upon what experitheir
and
62
WAR
ence this pathetic belief in the regenerative results of war could be founded; but the world had be-
come
filled
with
fine
phrases and this one, which
afforded comfort to
many
young
soldier,
was
taken up and endlessly repeated with an entire absence of the critical spirit.
Through the delivery of the second inaugural address the President continued to stress the reconstruction of the world after the
war
as the
aim of American diplomacy and endeavor. Certainly his pacifist friends had every right to believe that he meant to attain this by newer and finer methods than those possible in warfare, but it is only fair to say that his words were open
to both constructions.
It will
always be
difficult to
explain the change
in the President's intention
(if
indeed
it
was a
change) occurring between his inaugural address on March 4th and his recommendation for a declaration of war presented to Congress on April A well known English economist has re2nd. "The record shows Mr. Wilson up written cently to 1917 essentially a pacifist, and assailed as such.
:
There
is
nothing
in the external
evidence to ex-
plain his swift plunge into materialism.
His
'too
proud to fight' tania incident.
maxim was repeated
after the Lusi-
There is no evidence that the people who had elected him in the previous fall because he had 'kept us out' wanted to go in

until
63
?
Mr. Wilson made them want.
Why
it
did he
is
What was
the rapid conversion which
com-
monly supposed Mr. Wilson underwent in the winter of 1916-1917?" The pacifists were not idle during these days. meeting of all the leading peace societies was
called in
five,
of
March and a committee of which two were members of the Woman's

in
New York
Peace Party, was appointed to wait upon the President with suggestions for what we ventured to call possible alternatives to war. Professor Hull of Swarthmore College, a former student of the President's, presented a brief resume of what
American presidents had done through adjudication when the interests of American shipping had become involved during European
other
wars; notably, George Washington during the French Revolution and John Adams in the
Napoleonic War, so that international adjudication instituted by Chief Justice Jay became known
Europe as "the American plan." The President was, of course, familiar with that history, as he reminded his old pupil, but he brushed it aside as he did the suggestion that if the attack on
in
American shipping were submitted to The Hague tribunal, it might result in adjudication of the issues of the great war itself. The Labor man on the committee still expressed the hope for a popular referendum before war should be de-
64
WAR
and we once more pressed for a conOther suggestions were presented by a committee from the Union Against
clared,
ference of neutrals.
Militarism
who
entered the President's
office
as
we were
leaving it. The President's mood was stern and far from the scholar's detachment as he
told us of recent disclosures of
tions in
German machinaimpossibility
Mexico and announced the
of any form of adjudication. He still spoke to us, however, as to fellow pacifists to whom he was
war had become inevitable. He used one phrase which I had heard Colonel House use so recently that it still stuck firmly in my memory. The phrase was to the effect that,
forced to confess that
head of a nation participating in the war, the President of the United States would have a seat at the Peace Table, but that if he remained the
as
representative of a neutral country he could at best only "call through a crack in the door." The appeal he made was, in substance, that the foreign
policy which we so extravagantly admired could have a chance if he were there to push and to defend them, but not otherwise. It was as if his
heart's desire spoke through his words and dictated his view of the situation. But I found my
mind challenging
his
whole theory of leadership.

disappointment that I
Was
it
a result of
my bitter
hotly and no doubt unfairly asked myself whether any man had the right to rate his moral leadership
so high that he could consider the sacrifice of the lives of thousands of his young countrymen a necessity? I also reminded myself that all the study of modern social science is but a revelation
of the fallacy of such a point of view, a discrediting of the Carlyle contention that the people must
be led into the ways of righteousness by the experience, acumen and virtues of the great man.
was possible that the President would "go to the people" once more as he had gone years before with a brilliant formulization of democracy in
It
education
when he wanted
his Princeton policy
confirmed; or as he had appealed to the peace loving people during his campaign, solely in order
to confirm what he wanted to do and to explain what he thought wise. In neither case had he
offered himself as a willing instrument to carry He certainly did not out the people's desires.
dig the channels through which their purposes might flow and his own purpose be obtained because it had become one with theirs. It seemed
to
me
would
quite obvious that the processes of war destroy more democratic institutions than
he could ever rebuild however much he might declare the purpose of war to be the extension of democracy. What was this curious break between speech and deed, how could he expect to know the
doctrine
if
he refused to do the will?

felt
Some of us
that this genuine desire on the
66
WAR
part of the President, to be in a position to do great good was perhaps the crux of the difficulty
later
actually took his place at the Peace Table, sitting in fact at the head of a table, at which no umpire could have taken a seat, since
when he
only those on one side of the great conflict were permitted to sit there. The President had a seat
at the Peace Table as one among other victors, not as the impartial adjudicator. He had to drive a bargain for his League of Nations, he could not
insist
tions
upon it as the inevitable basis for negotiabetween two sides, the foundation of a "peace between equals."
the difficulties of the great compromise inherent in the situation, and would they still have
Were
been there even
if
both sides had been present
at a conference presided over by a fair minded judge? Certainly some of the difficulties would
have yielded
the mistakes
six
in such an atmosphere and some of would have been averted. Twentygovernments of the world stood convicted of
own impotence to preserve life and property, they were directly responsible for the loss of ten
their
many more peothe disease and desolation ple through following war, for the destruction of untold accumulations
million
in military service, as
men
of civilized life. What would have been the result had the head of one nation been there to testify to
a
new standard
in national
government?
What
67
might have happened if President Wilson could have said in January, 1919, what he had said in "A victor's terms imposed upon January, 1917, the vanquished would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest not permanently but only as upon
.
quicksand," or again, "The right state of mind, the right feeling between nations, is as necessary for a lasting peace as is the just settlement of
vexed questions of
tional allegiance."
territory,
or of racial and na-
At
that very
moment
the
wind
of idealism was blowing strongly across Europe, there were exaggerated hopes of a new and better
world from which war should be forever banished. Europe distrusted any compromise with a monster which had already devoured her young men and
but destroyed her civilization. man who had stood firmly against participation in war could have had his way with the common people in
all
every country. The President became the center of the world's hopes because of the things he had said against war, and because people believed that
he expressed their own abhorrence. Did the not befail to hearts of Nations win their League
cause
it
was too
it
idealistic
in
or too
pacifistic
but
because
cause
permitted war
too
many
instances, beis
its
very structure and functioning
per-
vaded by the war
spirit, the victorious disciplin-
68
WAR
ing the defeated, whereas the people had dreamed of a League of Peace lifting up all those who
had been
the victims of militarism?
in destroying the
fices
General Smuts has said that the Paris Peace moral idealism born of the sacriof the war, did almost as much as the war shatter the structure of western civiliza-
itself to
But the disastrous Peace came about, to the words of General Smuts himself, bequote cause "in the end not only the leaders but the
tion.
people themselves preferred a bit of booty here, a strategic frontier there, a coal field or an oil
well, an addition to their population or their reto all the faint allurements of an ideal." sources
spirit itself which failed, under a temptation which an spirit earlier peace might have diminished. An impartial judge who could have insisted that there should be "no discriminations to those to whom we wish to be just, and those to whom we do not wish to be just," might in a measure have cooled
It
was indeed
the
human
but the
human
the nationalistic passions inevitably aroused by a
long and disastrous war, might have substituted other hopes for those so long deferred, for the glittering promises which must of necessity remain unfulfilled. Or was the difficulty more funda-
mental? Did the world expect two roles from one man, when experience should have clearly indicated that ability to play the two are seldom com-
69
bined in the same person? The power to make the statement, to idealize a given situation, to formulate the principle, is a gift of the highest sort,
assumes with intellectual power a certain ability of philosophic detachment; in one sense it implies the spectator rather than the doer.
but
it
must man who have a sense of achievement, of having done what he is best fitted to do he has made his contribution and it is almost inevitable that he should
has thus formulated a situation
;
feel that the thing itself
has been accomplished.
To
require the same man later on to carry out his dictum in a complicated, contradictory situation demands such a strain upon his temperament that
it may be expecting him to do what only another man of quite another temperament could do. Cer-
have been profoundly modified by President Wilson's magnificent contribution. From one aspect of the situation he did
tainly international affairs
obtain his end; to urge "open covenants, openly arrived at" as a basic necessity for a successful society of nations, cuts at the root of a prolific
cause for
the
war by simply turning on
the light.
But
upon such a course of procedure in actual negotiations is not only he who sees the situation but he who is bent
successfully insist
man who would
upon the attainment of a beloved cause has become his heart's desire.
object,
whose
Nothing can
ever destroy the effect of the public utterance of
70
WAR
the phrase, and the President may well contend that to have aided in the establishment of a
League of Nations Secretariat where all treaties must be registered before they are valid is, in
accomplishment of his dictum, although he must inevitably encounter the disappointment of those who believed it to imply an open discussion of the terms of the Peace Treaty, which to his mind was an impossibility. Such an interpretation may explain the paradox that the author of
fact, the
the fourteen points returned that he had achieved them.
from
Paris, claiming
Naturally, during the war, there was little that pacifist organizations could do from time to time
;
we put
out suggestions, sending them directly to
those government authorities who were responsible for the policies recommended. Our small
group was much disturbed as were other American citizens, by what became increasingly obvious
as the
war progressed,
that the policies of the
war
as well as its actual conduct
were falling into the
hands of the
militarists.
annual meeting that a beginning be made by the Allies to form an Executive Council not only for political action at the
present but for the future as well. that Great Britain, France and the U.
We proposed at our fourth
We
S.
suggested A. each
appoint three delegates to an Allied Political Council; that Italy and Japan each appoint two
71
delegates; that the other nations associated in military opposition to Germany each appoint one
delegate; that these delegates meet in London and organize in a deliberative and advisory capacity.
positive authority as the Versailles Military Council

at that
We hoped that
it
could assume as
much
was
moment exercising, not only in milibut ultimately in civil affairs as well. matters tary Some such policy did later of course develop,
through the Supreme Economic Council, although
a travesty of
what we had hoped
for.
pacifists were in a certain sense outlaws during the war, our group was no longer in direct communication with the White House, which
As
was of course
enough we
to be expected, although curiously
only slowly detached ourselves from the assumption that the President really shared
our convictions.
He
himself at last left no
room
for doubt, when in November he declared before the American Federation of Labor that he had
peace, but
We
to
a contempt for pacifists because "I, too, want I know how to get it, and they do not." quite agreed with him that he knew how if he
meant
tions,
League of Nabut we could not understand how he hoped

to secure peace through a
in
do it through war. heard President Wilson speak in Carnegie Hall in February, 1919,
New York
just before
he returned to Europe for the continuance of the
72
WAR
Peace Conference, where he stressed the fact that League would be inextricably woven together. Later in the same speech, when he said "that those who oppose the League must be deaf to the demands of the common man the world over," I could not but speculate why, therethe treaty and the
must the League depend upon the treaty? far had it been his war experiences which had led him to place his trust in treaties, above his trust in the instincts of humble people, in whose hearts the desire for peace had at last taken
fore,
How
sanctuary ?
CHAPTER
IV
A REVIEW OF BREAD RATIONS AND WOMAN'S

TRADITIONS
As
the
European war continued and new

developed
for
the
relief
organizations
care
of
the
wounded and orphaned,

felt increasingly the
it
the
members of our group
need for the anodyne of work,
was difficult to find our places. For although instance, the American Red Cross, following the practice of the British society, had become part of the military organization as it had never done before and its humanitarian appeal for funds had
fully utilized the
war
enthusiasms.
Such a comfor pacifists

all
bination
not only more to become identified with the

it
made
difficult
Red
Cross, but
war
activities
which were dependent upon public
funds became very timid in regard to pacifist cooperation. This was, of course, quite natural as
newspapers constantly coupled the words and pro-German with the word pacifist, as if they described one and the same person. There were in fact many examples arising from
the
traitor
the fear of imperiling a

pacifist
good cause by having
identified
with
it,
that resulted in indi-
73
74
WAR
vidual pacifists withdrawing from organizations which they had themselves founded or fostered.
But although our feelings were sometimes hurt at the moment when it was made obvious that one or another was persona non grata, I think, on the
whole,
at
we
tical politics as responsible
frankly recognized the instinct for pracfor certain incidents;
any rate, we learned to take our rebuffs without
a sense of grievance. Personally, I found these incidents easier to bear than the occasional perse-
came the other way around; when and fanatical pacifists openly challenged the honesty and integrity of their former associates who had become convinced of the necutions which
enthusiastic
cessity for the
war.
I,
With many other Americans
therefore, ex-
perienced a great sense of relief when Congress finally established a Department of Food Administration for the United States and
when Mr.
Hoover, who had spent two and a half years in Europe in intimate contact with the backwash of
war, made his
men
appeal to his fellow countryof the food shortage of the entire world, insisting that "the situation is more than war, it is a problem of humanity."
first
in the
name
Certainly here
was
a line of activity into
which
we might throw ourselves with enthusiasm, and if we were not too conspicuous we might be perThe latter mitted to work without challenge.
A REVIEW OF BREAD RATIONS
75
was perhaps too much to hope for. But although the challenge came from time to time, in my case at least it did not prove a deterrent and I was soon receiving many more invitations than I could
possibly accept to speak on food conservation in relation to European needs some of these invita;
were under the auspices of the Federal Department of Food Administration, and in California, Texas, Colorado and other states under the auspices of the State. But what I cared most for was an opportunity to speak to women's organizations
tions,
because
not only believed, as
somewhat
elaborately stated, that "in this great undertaking women may bear a valiant part if they but stretch
their minds to comprehend what it means in this world crisis to produce food more abundantly and to conserve it with wisdom," but I also believed that we might thus break through into more primitive and compelling motives than those in-
ducing so
many women
to increase the
war
spirit.
There was something
as primitive and real about feeding the helpless as there was about the fighting and in the race history the tribal feeding of
children antedated mass fighting by perhaps a million years. Anthropologists insist that war has
not been in the world for more than 20,000 years. It is in fact so recent that existing remnants of
primitive people do not understand it. They may be given to individual murder but not to the col-
76
WAR
numbers of men against other Could not the earlier instinct and training in connection with food be aroused and would it be strong enough to overwhelm and quench the later tendency to war. Each individual
lective fighting of
masses of men.
within
strains:
I
himself
I
represented something of both used to remind myself that although
had had ancestors who fought in all the American wars since 1684, I was also the daughter,
granddaughter and the great granddaughter of
earliest recollection was of being held up in a pair of dusty hands to see the heavy stone mill wheels go round. The happiest occupation of my childhood was to watch the old millers.
My
foaming water wheel turning in the back of the I could tell by the sound of the mill when the old wheel was used, which occurred occasionally long after the turbines were established. Watching the foaming water my childish mind followed the masses of hard yellow wheat through the processes of grinding and bolting into the piled drifts of white flour and sometimes further into myriad bowls of bread and milk. Again, those two strains of War and Bread mingled in my memory of months of travel. Certainly drilling soldiers and the constant reviewing of troops were seen in all the capital cities of Europe but there were also the peasant women who, all the world over, are still doing such
mill.
77
a large part of the work connected with the growI recalled them ing and preparation of foods. in the fields of vast Russia as in the everywhere
tiny pastures of
Switzerland; by every roadside in
hand mills; were forever the water of Egypt they carrying the Nile that the growing corn might not perish. The newspapers daily reported the changing fortunes of war on both fronts and our souls turned sick with anxiety and foreboding because all that the modern world held dear hung upon the hazards of battle. But certainly the labor for bread, which to me was more basic and legitimate than war, was still going on everywhere. In my
Palestine they were grinding at the
in
desire to uncover
it,
to
make
clear
woman's
its
tradi-
tional activity with

significance, I
something of
poetry and
read endlessly in Fraser's "Golden two Bough," large volumes of which are given over to the history and interpretation of the innumerable myths dealing with the Spirits of the Corn. These spirits are always feminine and are usually represented by a Corn Mother and her daughter, vaguely corresponding to the Greek Demeter the always fostering Earth, and her
child
Persephone.
the risk of breaking into the narrative of this book, so far as there is one, I am venturing
to repeat
At
some of the material which brought a
touch of comfort to
me and
which, so far as I
78
WAR
was able at that moment, I handed on to other women. Fraser discovers that relics of the Corn Mother and the Corn Maiden are found in nearly
all
the harvest fields of Europe;
among many
North American Indians; the Eastern world has its Rice Mother, for whom there are solemn ceremonies when the seed rice, believed to contain "soul stuff," is gathered. These deities are always feminine, as is perhaps natural from the association with fecundity and growth, and about them has gathered much of the poetry and
tribes of
sowing of the grain and the gathering of the harvest, and those saddest plaints of all, expressing the sorrows of famine. Myths centering about the Corn Mother but dimly foreshadowed what careful scientific researches have later verified and developed. Students of primitive society believe that women were the first agriculturists and were for a long time the only inventors and developers of its processes.
song
in the
The men
soil
little for cultivating the the beyond clearing space and sometimes sura it rounding by rough protection. The woman
of the tribe did
as consistently supplied all cereals and roots eaten by the tribe as the man brought in the game and
fish, and in early picture writing the short hoe became as universally emblematic of woman as the spear of the hunter, or the shield and battle axe of the warrior. In some tribes it became a fixed
79
belief that seeds would not grow if planted by a man, and apparently all primitive peoples were convinced that seeds would grow much better if
planted by women. In Central Africa to this day a woman may obtain a divorce from her husband
and return to her father's

fails to
tribe,
if
the former
It is
provide her with a garden and a hoe. said that every widespread myth has
its
counterpart in the world of morals. This is cerStudents tainly true of the "fostering Mother." in the origin of social customs contend that the
madic
gradual change from the wasteful manner of nolife to a settled and much more economic
of existence
mode
fairly attributed to these primitive agricultural women. Mothers in order
may be
to keep their children alive had transplanted roots from the forest or wild grains from the plains,
into patches of rudely cultivated ground.
We can
easily imagine when the hunting was poor or when the flocks needed a new pasture, that the men
of the tribe would be for
moving
on, but that the
women might
they could not possibly go until their tiny crops were garnered; and that if the tribe were induced to remain in the same
insist that
caves or huts until after harvest the
women might
even timidly hope that they could use the same

next year, and thus avert the loss of their children, sure to result from the alternation of
fields
gorging when the hunt was good and of starv-
8o
WAR
ing when it was poor. The desire to grow food for her children led to a fixed abode and to the
beginning of a home, from which our domestic morality and customs are supposed to have originated.
With such a historic background, me that women might, in response
it
to the
seemed to food
saving and food production appeals issued in one country after another, so enlarge their conception of duty that the consciousness of the world's needs
for food should become the actual impulse of their
daily activities. It also presented another interesting aspect; from the time we were little children we have
all
of
us,
at
moments
at least, cherished over-
whelming
desires to be of use in the great world,

its
to play a conscious part in
progress.
The
diffi-
culty has always been in attaching our vague purposes to the routine of our daily living, in making
a synthesis between our ambitions to cure the ills of the world on the one hand, and the need to
conform to household requirements on the other. It was a very significant part of the situation, therefore, that at this world's crisis the two had become absolutely essential to each other. A great world purpose could not be achieved without woman's participation founded upon an intelligent understanding and upon the widest sympathy, at the same time the demand could be met

only
its
81
if it
very success depending
were attached to her domestic routine, upon a conscious change

this syn-
and modification of her daily habits. It was no slight undertaking to make

thesis, it
afforded probably the most compelling has been made upon woman's conwhich challenge structive powers for centuries. It required all her
human
affection
and
all
her clarity of mind to
make
the kind of adjustment which the huge scale of the situation demanded.
It is quite understandable that there was no place for woman and her possible contribution in international affairs under the old diplomacy.
Such things were indeed not "woman's sphere." But it was possible that as women entered into politics when clean milk and the premature labor
of children became factors in political life, so they might be concerned with international affairs when these at last were dealing with such human and poignant matters as food for starving peoples who could be fed only through interna-
tional activities.
I recall a great audience in
Hot
Springs, Ar-
kansas,
made up of the members of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. It seemed to me
that every woman there might influence her community "back home," not only to produce and to save more food, but to pour into the war torn world such compassion as would melt down its
82
WAR
animosities and bring back into it a gregarious instinct older and more human that the motives
responsible for war.
believed that a generous
response to this world situation might afford an opportunity to lay over again the foundations for
a wider, international morality, as woman's concern for feeding her children had made the beginare told nings of an orderly domestic life.
We
the crops of grain and roots so painstakingly produced by primitive women began to have a commercial value their production and ex-
that
when
change were taken over by the men, as men later turned the manufacturing of pottery and other of
woman's early
ties.
industries into profit
making
activi-
Such a history, suggested that this situation might be woman's opportunity if only because foods were, during the war, no longer considered primarily in regard to their money-making value but
man
it
use.
from the point of view of their huBecause the production of food was,
moment, dependent upon earlier motives, had fallen back into woman's hands. There had developed a wide concern for the feeding of hungry people, an activity with which women were
normally connected.
for the
As
had
felt the
young immigrant conscripts
caught up into a great world movement, which sent them out to fight, so it seemed to me the millions of American women might be caught up

into a great
83
world purpose, that of conservation of life; there might be found an antidote to war in woman's affection and all-embracing pity for
helpless children.
Certainly compassion is not without its social Up to the present moment the nations, in utility.
have conspicuously lacked that humane quality which has come in their domestic policies through the increasing care for the poor, and the protection of children. These have been responsible for all sorts of ameliorative legislation during the later years, in one nation after another. In their relations to each other, hownations have been without 'such motives of ever, humanitarian action until the Allied nations, durtheir foreign policies,
ing the war,

distress
evolved a strikingly new foreign
policy in their efforts to relieve the starvation
and
throughout widespread areas. There are such unexpected turnings in the paths
it
of moral evolution that
would not be without
precedent that a new and powerful force might be unloosed in the world when the motive for pro-
ducing and shipping food on the part of great nations was no longer a commercial one but had for
the
moment
shifted to a desire to feed hungry
people with whose governments they had entered into obligations. Such a force might in the future have to be reckoned with as a factor in inter-
national
affairs.
84
WAR
In those dark years, so destructive of the old codes, the nations were forced back to their tribal
function of producing and conserving food in contrast to the methods of modern commerce.
All food supplies had long been collected and distributed through the utilization of the commercial motive. When it was commercially valuable to a
man, to a firm or nation, food was
ship-
ped; when it was not commercially valuable, food was withheld or even destroyed. At that moment, however, the Allied Nations were collecting and conserving a common food supply and each nation
was facing the

all
necessity of
making
certain
common good that the threat might be averted. A new internationalism was being established day by day; the making of a more reasonable world order, so cogently urged by the President of the United States, was to some extent already under way, the
concessions to the
of famine for
war
itself
forming
its
matrix.
There was
a substitution of the social utility
motive for that of commercial gain, energized pity

for that of business enterprise. Mr. Hoover had "The wheat loaf has ascended in the imagsaid
:
enormous populations as the positive of national survival." It seemed as if the symbol lack of age-long organization between the naination of
tions, the
politics,
dearth of
human
was about
relationships in world to be corrected, because an
85
unspeakable disaster had forced the nations to consider together the primitive questions of famine
and
pestilence.
It
international ethic
was
possible that a new arising from these humble
was
beginnings, as the defense and feeding of the dependent members of the tribe had laid the foundations of tribal loyalty and of national existence In spite of the great mass of social data itself.
accumulated in the last century,
in spite
of wide-
been no sucspread cessful attempt to reduce the chaos of human affairs into a rational world order. Society failed to make a community of nations and was at last tragically driven to the beginnings of one along the old primitive folkways, as if in six thousand years no other method could have been devised.
intellectual training, there has
It
seemed, therefore, a great historic achieve-
ment that there should have been devised a workable method for the collective purchase of food,
men
to prohibit profiteering in "the precious stuff that live by," even for the duration of the war.
We
tion
had
all
been much impressed by the methods
of food distribution in Belgium. Fifteen million dollars each month were lent to that unhappy na-
which had taken over feeding her beleaguered responsibility population. This amount was spent in the United States for food and its value was carefully considered by the Division of Research in Nutritive
by the United
States,
the
of
86
WAR
Value in the Department of Food Administration. This Division undertook to know, as well as science could tell, what were the necessary daily rations to maintain health and strength in the several occupations, and how the requirements could best be met from the stores on hand. Such words as "adequate nutrition" and "physiological values" had been made practical issues and the administrative world represented by governmental officials
was then
food and the feeding of human beings of pure science.
seriously considering the production of in the light
a result, the political relations at least between Belgium and her Allies had completely
As
shifted
from
the commercial to the humanitarian.
To
quote again from a speech of Mr. Hoover's: "For tnree years three million bushels monthly of
North American wheat,

lion
largely from the charity of the world, has been the daily bread of ten mil-
human
France.
To
beings in Belgium and Northern those who doled out this scant al-
lowance, wheat became indelibly the precious symbol of life."
To
transfer this concern for food into the in-
ternational field
was
to enlarge
its
functions enor-
mously as well as to increase its proportions. The Allied Nations had seriously undertaken to solve
the problem of producing with the utmost economy of human labor the largest amount of food
87
and of distributing that food to the points of greatest need, they had been forced to make international arrangements for its distribution, exactly as intelligently as they were producing war
supplies.
It
was
easier to
do
this
because each of the
Allied Nations, in additions to feeding the soldiers and the munition makers who were directly
concerned
in the tragic business of
"winning the
war," had also become responsible for feeding its The appointment of entire civilian population. food controllers, the issuing of bread cards and the system of rationing, was undertaken quite
as
much
in the interest of just dealing in
food sup-
plies as for
food conservation
itself.
government, in the winter of 1916, constantly speaking on food conservation as such, had undertaken the responsibility of providing the British Isles with all its imported food, and other belligerent and neutral nations had been obliged
to pursue the
tion.
The British when we were
same course in order to avert starvaCommercial competition had been sup-
pressed, not in response to any theory, but because it could not be trusted to Teed the feeble
and helpless. The European governments had been compelled to undertake, as the consequence of the shortage in materials, the single-handed purchase of their supplies both for civil and military purposes. There had grown up an enormous
88
WAR
consolidation of buying for a hundred and twenty a phenomenon never million European people before witnessed in the economic history of the
world.
accomplishment, it seemed reasonable to hope for world order in other directions as well. Certainly some of the obstructions were giving
With
this
way.
An
English economist had said

has, so far, in
in
"The war
Europe
generally,
1917: thrown
the customs tariff flat."
Were
they, perhaps, dis-
appearing under this onslaught of energized pity for world-wide needs, and was a motive power, new in the relations between nations being evolved in response to hunger and dependence as the earliest domestic ethics had been? It was becoming clear that nations cannot oppose their political frontiers as an obstacle to free labor and exchange
without suffering themselves and causing suffering; that the world was faced with a choice be-
tween freedom
this
in international
commerce or
in-
ternational conflicts of increasing severity.
Under
preferential inevitably disappear because the nation denied the open door must suffer in its food
tariffs
new standard of measurement,

would
;
supplies the control of strategic waterways or interstate railroad lines by any one nation which
might be tempted to consider only the interest of its own commerce, would become unthinkable. All that then would be necessary to secure the in-
89
ternationalization of the Straits of Bosphorus would be a demonstration of the need in Western Europe for Russian wheat, which had hitherto
been exported so capriciously; the international

building and control of a railroad into Mesopotamia would depend, not upon the ambition of
upon the world's need of the food which could again be secured from the capacious valley of the Euphrates by the restoration of the canal system so long ago destroyed. Serbia would be assured a railroad to the sea through a strip of international territory, because ready acrival nations, but
so necessary to a nation's food and because one of the principal causes of

cess to sea-going ships
is
the economic friction that so often lies behind
wars
is
the fear of countries that have no ports
lest the neighboring country through which their export and import trade has to pass should hamper
and interrupt the
transit.
Certainly during the winter of 1916-17 I, personally, came to believe it possible that the more
sophisticated
and
territorial
if
themselves
questions of national grouping control would gradually adjust the paramount human question of
food for the hungry were fearlessly and drastically I ventured treated upon an international basis. that the of further, Nations, upon which League the whole world, led by President Wilson, was fastening its hopes, might be founded not upon
90

bits of international law,
WAR
broken
but upon min-
istrations to primitive human needs. Much had been said during the war about primitive emotion and instinctive action, but certainly
their use
struction.
need not be reserved to purposes of deAfter all, the first friendly communication between tribe and tribe came through the need of food when one or the other was starving
and too weak

sion
to fight; primitive human compasthe folkway which afterward developed I dared to believe into political relationships.
made
that this early human instinct to come together in order to avert widespread starvation could not be forever thwarted by appeals to such later separatist instincts as
nationalism and therefore urged
that the gates be opened and that these primitive emotions be allowed to flood our devastated
By all means let the beneficent tide be and canalized by the proposed League of (directed Nations which was, after all, the outgrowth of
world.
century old dreams.
CHAPTER V.
A SPECULATION ON BREAD LABOR AND WAR
SLOGANS.
IT was at the end of the winter of 1916-17 that news came of the Russian Revolution. Perhaps it was because this peasant revoluthe astounding
tion
reminded
me
sincere
statement of the
of Bondereff's "Bread Labour," aspirations of the

first
Russian peasants, that the events during the
weeks of the revolution seemed to afford a sharp contrast between the simple realities of life and the unreal slogans with which the war was being stimulated. Years of uncertainty, of conflicting reports, and of disillusionment, which have followed the Russian Revolution of March 1917, make it difficult to recall our first impressions of the most astounding phenomenon in this astounding world as the two thousand miles of Russian soldiers along the Eastern Front in the days following the abdication of the Czar talked endlessly to their enemy brothers in the opposing
trenches.
During
their
long conversation the
Russian
peasant soldiers were telling the East Prussian
92

:
WAR
peasant soldiers what Bondereff and other peasant leaders had told them that the great task of this generation of Russians is to "free the land" as a
former generation had already freed the
serfs
and
slaves; that the future of the Russian peasant depends not upon garrisons and tax gatherers but
perform "bread labor" on and upon his ability to extend good will and just dealing to all men. With their natural inference that there was no longer any need to carry on the Czar's war was an overwhelming eagerness to get back to the land which
upon
his willingness to
his recovered soil,
they believed was at last to be given those who They doubtless said that the actually tilled it.
peasants had long been holding themselves in readiness for the great revolution which would set men free from brutal oppression. They believed that this revolution must, before all, repair "the great crime," which in their minds was al-
ways the monopolization of the land by a few

thousand men with the resulting enslavement of
millions of others.
The revolution must begin in Russia because no people are so conscious of this Their absorption iniquity as the Russian people.
in the revolution
and their inveterate land hunger
caused
many
Russian peasants to regard the world
war
mere interruption to the fulfillment of their supreme obligation. It was certainly the wisdom of the humble, the
itself as a
A SPECULATION ON BREAD LABOR
93
very counsel of imperfection, which was exemplified by this army of tattered men, walking so
But they may have naively in the dawning light. been "the unhindered and adventuring sons of God," as they renounced warfare in favor of their
Some of them old right to labor in the ground. in the earliest days of the revolution made a pilgrimage to Tolstoy's grave in the forest of Kadaz
and wrote these words upon a piece of paper which they buried in the leaf mold lying loosely above him: "Love to neighbors, nay the greatest love
of
all, love to enemies, is now being accomplished." In the Russian peasant's dread of war there has always been a passive resistance to the reduction
when
of the food supply, because he well knows that a man is fighting he ceases to produce food
and that the world will at length be in danger of starvation. Next to the masses of India and
China, the Russian peasants feel the pinch of hunger more frequently than any other people on earth. Russia is the land of modern famines; the present one was preceded by those of 1891,
1906,
and 1911.
of
The
at
last,
still
vivid in the
thirty
memory
men
the
front,
affected
million people, and reduced eight million people to actual starvation. The Russian peasant saw
three and a half years of the Great War, during which time, according to his own accounting, seven million of his people perished and the
94
WAR
Russian soldiers, never adequately equipped with food and clothing, were reduced To go back to his village, to the last extremity.
ammunition,
to claim his share of food, to
till
the ground as
quickly as possible,
was
to follow an imperative
and unerring instinct. In his village, if anywhere, Prince Kropotkin in his he would find bread. Bread" written nearly twenty "Conquest of predicted that so soon as The Revoluyears ago tion came, the peasant would keep enough bread for himself and his children, but that the towns and cities would experience such a dearth of grain that "the farmers in America could hardly be able But he adds "There will be an into cover it." of crease production as soon as the peasant realizes that he is no longer forced to support the
:
idle rich
by
his toil.
New
tracts of land will be
cleared and improved machines set agoing .... Never was the land so energetically cultivated as
by the French peasants
in 1792." In line with these peasant traditions, the first appeal issued by the All Russian Peasant Union
still
to the soldier
at the front read in this wise
"Remember, brothers that the Russian army is a peasant army, comprising now the best men of the whole peasantry; that the Russian land is the peasant's land; that the peasant is the principal
toiler on this land he is its master, therefore, without the master it is impossible to solve properly the land question."

Peasants
all
95
over the world magnify and consider obligatory labor in the ground, but the Russian peasant adds to this urge for bread labor a
religious motive revealed in his to his fellow-workman in the field
his measure of grain, and may world be a Christian." This mystic connection between piety and bread labor has, of course, been expressed in many forms; to quote from an
formal greeting "To every man every man in the

:
English poet:
"And when
Christ
drove the clods apart

in
would be plowing
:
my
heart."
Or from
a French one
"Au milieu du grand silence, le pays se recusille soucieusement, tandis que, pas a pas, priante, la Lucie laisse, un a un,
tomber
les grains qui luisent."
Or from
Every
Norwegian
"The sower walked bare-headed cast was made with care in a

is
. . .
in Jesu's
spirit
name.
of kindly
resignation; so
where corn
it is throughout all the world sown. little showers of grain hand." at famine from the sower's flung
Certainly tilling the soil, living a life of mutual labor has been at the bottom of many religious
From this orders and mystic social experiments. of that had view, Tolstoy point rejoiced groups of
96
WAR
worked
Russian peasants had never owned land but had it always with the needs of the whole vil-
lage in mind, thus keeping close to Christian teaching and to a life of piety.
tithesis of
bread labor, the very anwar, wide-spread may be easily deA monstrated. newspaper clipping on my desk contains a dispatch from Bressa in Asia Minor, which reads as follows "The country had been revived by rains with the awakening of spring, and
this instinct of
is
:
That
peasants are seen working in the fields, kissing the earth and thanking Allah for the blessed rain and also praying for peace and the riddance from the
lands of the soldiers marching across to war."
When we were in Austria-Hungary in 1915, we were constantly told stories of Russian soldiers who throughout the spring had easily been taken prisoners because they had heard that war prisoners in Austria were working upon the land. These Russian peasant soldiers had said to their captors, now that spring had come they wanted to get back to work, and so they would like to be made
prisoners at least long enough to put the seed into the ground. They wished to put seed into the
national or individual
ground irrespective of
ownership.
its
I recall an evening years
garden
at
ago when I sat in the Yasnaya Polyana, that Tolstoy begged

us to
97
remember that the Russian peasant did not change his nature when he shed his blouse and put
coat. Tolstoy predicted that the Russian peasants in thjir permanent patience, their insatiable hunger for bread labor, may at
on the Czar's
impossible to an entire agricultural hard to determine whether the Ruspeople. sian soldiers who, in 1917, refused to fight, had merely become so discouraged by their three years of futile warfare and so cheered by the success of a bloodless revolution in Petrograd and Moscow that they dared to venture the same tactics in the very trenches, or whether these fighting men in Galicia yielded to an instinct to labor on the land which is more primitive and more imperative than
last
It is
make war
the desire for war.
tion
During the early days of the Russian revoluit seemed to me that events bore out the as-
sumption that the Russian peasants, with every aspect of failure, were applying the touchstone of reality to certain slogans evolved during the war, to unreal phrases which had apparently gripped It was in fact the leading minds of the world. of the first revolutionthe very desire on the part ists in the spring of 1917 to stand aside from
political as well as
and to
cling only to
gible realities
from military organizations what they considered the tanof existence, which was most diffi-
98

world
it,
WAR
The
cult for the outside
to understand.
in
speculation as I recall what as follows

:
evolved
my mind some-
The many
Allied nations in the midst of a
desperate war, were being held together by certain formulae of their war aims which had gradually
emerged during long years of mutual
effort.
Such stirring formulae or statements could be to all the diverse Allies, however, only if took on the abstract characteristics of genthey eral principles. This use of the abstract state-
common
ment, necessary
comes greatly
in all political relationships, beintensified in time of war, as if il-
lustrating the contention that men die willingly The question inevitably sugonly for a slogan. Had the slogans this is a war gested itself:
end war and a war to safeguard the world for democracy become so necessary to united milito
tary action that the Allies resented the naive attempt on the part of the Russian peasants to
achieve democracy without
believed that the aims of the
war? They so firmly war could only be
accomplished through a victory of the Allies that they would not brook this separation of the aim
from the method. Apparently the fighting had become an integral part of the slogan itself.
The
necessity for holding fast to such phrases
suggests one of those great historic myths which large bodies of men are prone to make for them-

selves
99
re-
when they
its
unite in a
common purpose
consummation the thorough and efficient output of moral energy. Mankind is so fertile in virtue and heroism, so prone to transcend his own powers, that the making and unmaking of
quiring for
myths always accompanies a period of great moral awakening. Such myths are almost certain to outlast their social utility, and very often
these
they outlive their originators
as the
myth of The
Second Coming evolved by the Early Christians held for a thousand years. Had this myth of our contemporaries that De-
mocracy
is
to be secured through war, so obsessed
the Allies that they were constrained to insist that the troops fight it out on the eastern front as else-
where, in spite of the fact that fraternal intercourse, which the Russians were employing, is the
very matrix of Democracy?
Had war
so mili-
tarized and clericalized the leading nations of the world that it was difficult for them to believe that
the Russian soldiers, having experienced that purification of the imagination and of the intellect
which the Greeks believed to come through pity and terror, had merely been the first to challenge the myth, to envisage the situation afresh and reduce it to its human terms
!
Vernon Lee contends that

characteristic of an historic
it
is
the essential
it
myth
its
that so long as
does not attempt to produce
own
realization,
ioo
it
WAR
begets unhesitating belief and wholesale action and that as men go on expressing it with sufficient
self-denying fervor} they secure a great output of The necessity for consanctity and heroism.
tinuing this output, of unifying diverse nations, may account for the touch of fear easily detected
on the part of the ardent advocates of war, when they were asked not to ignore the fact that at least on one front war was actually ending under conditions of disarmament and free trade. They did not admit that democracy could be established
throughout one-sixth of the earth's surface only
would recognize the fact that the Russian soldiers had ceased to fight; Kerensky's group, or any other remaining in power, would at length have been obliged to acknowledge it for no
if
the Allies
governmental group could have been upheld by the Russian people unless it had declared for peace and for free land. Did the Allies fear to jar the abstraction which had become so dear to them? Did they realize
instinctively that they
would
of a slogan by acknowledging
cripple the usefulness its partial achieve-
ment? It was perhaps

should be the
first
expected that Russia nation to apply the touchstone

to be
of reality to a warring world so absorbed in abstractions. If Tolstoy may be considered in any sense the prototype of his countrymen, it may be

permitted to
stractions,
cite
101
his
inveterate
dislike
of ab-
whether stated
in philosophic, patriotic
or religious terms; his firm belief that such abstractions lay the foundation for blind fanaticism;
his oft-repeated statement that certain forms of patriotism are inimical to a life of reason.
At
that time the Allied nations were
all learn-
ing to say that the end of this war would doubtless see profound political changes and democratic reconstruction,
when
the animalistic forces which
are inevitably encouraged as a valuable asset in warfare, should once more be relegated to a sub-
ordinate place. And yet when one of the greatest reconstructions was actually happening bepossible
fore their very eyes, the war-weary world insisted that the Russian soldier should not be permitted
to return to the land but should continue to fight. This refusal on the part of the Allied Governments suggests that they were so obsessed by the dogmatic morality of war, in which all humanly tangible distinctions between normal and abnormal disappear, that they were literally blind to the moral implications of the Russian attempt.
The
Russian soldiers, suddenly turned into pro-
pagandists, inevitably exhibited a youthful selfconsciousness which made their own emotional ex-
perience the center of the universe. Assuming that others could not be indifferent to their high
aims, they placidly insisted
upon expounding
their
102

But
all
WAR
new-found hopes.
this
made
the war-
ring world, threatened with defeat if the German army on the eastern front were released, still more
impatient.
Possibly, as a foolish pacifist, wishing to see what was not there, I gave myself over to idle
It may be true that the spiritual speculation. realism as well as the real politik was with the Allied statesmen who forced Kerensky to keep his
men
at
war even
at the price of
throwing Russia
into dire confusion.
These statesmen considered the outcome of the

Russian Revolution of
illed
little
moment compared
to
the future of civilization which
was then imper-
by the
men on
possibility of a German victory if the the eastern front were allowed to reinforce
the west. But such an assumption based on the very doctrines of war, was responsible for Brest Litovsk; for "peace after a smashing victory;" for the remarkable terms in the Versailles treaty for Trotsky's huge army; for much of the present
;
confusion in the world. Did the Russians, for one golden moment, offer a way out? or was the
present outcome inevitable? Three times in crucial moments in the world's
history and with a simple dramatic gesture have representatives of Russia attempted to initiate
the
machinery which should secure permanent

all
peace for
nations.

ander
103
First: the proposals of the Russian Czar, AlexI, in 1815, at the Peace Conference follow-
ing the Napoleonic Wars, for "An All-Embracing Reform of the political system of Europe which
should guarantee universal peace" and the resulting Holy Alliance which, according to historians, did not succeed "owing to the extremely religious
character in which
it
was conceived."
Second: the calling of the first Hague ConferHis broad outline ence by Nicholas II, in 1899.
of the work which such a conference ought to do was considered "too idealistic" by the other
powers,
who
tried to limit the function of the
Hague Conferences to the reduction of armaments and to the control of the methods of warfare.
Third: the spontaneous
effort of the first
Rus-
sian revolutionists to break through the belief that any spiritual good can be established through the
agency of large masses of men fighting other large masses and their naive attempt to convert inThe string of Russian soldiers dividual soldiers. to their recent enemies stretched from the talking
Baltic sea to the Carpathian Mountains. These simple men assumed that men wished to labor in
the soil and did not wish to fight, while all the rest of the world remained sceptical and almost rejoiced over the failure of the experiment, before it had really been tried. Certainly the world was
104
in

mood
WAR
It
no
was
just then to listen to "mere talk." resounding with a call to arms.
With our Anglo-Saxon crispness of expression we are prone to be amused at the Russian's inveterate habit of discussion and to quote with tolerant contempt the old saying: "Two Russians
three opinions," without stopping to reflect that the method has in practice worked out excellently
for the self-governing administration of village af-
throughout an enormous territory. the first detachment of Russian Doukhoboritsi were settling in Western Canada, they discussed for two and a half days and two nights the location of the three villages into which the detachment was divided. One possible site was very much more desirable than the other two and the Anglo-Saxon onlooker feared that this factor
fairs
When
decision.
alone might indefinitely prolong the difficulty of But not at all the discussion came to
and never again reopened nor was the disparity and the dea natural end, the matter
sirability of the locations
was
settled
ever again referred to concerned. The matter had been satisby anyone in settled the factorily prolonged discussion by all the "souls" entitled to participate. It proved
after all to have been a very good way. forget that to obtain the "inner consent"
We
of a
man who
differs
from us
is
always a slow
process, that quite as
it is
quicker to punish an un-
105
ruly child than to bring him to a reasonable state of mind; to imprison a criminal than to reform
him; to coerce an ignorant

the
man
than to teach him

quicker to fight
meaning of the law, so
it is
than to convince them one by one. curious and very spontaneous manifestation of good-will towards Russia occurred in Chicago
armies of
men
in the spring of 1918.
with the slogan
A society was organized "Ten Million Pairs of Shoes for
Russia," and ten thousand old shoes were actually
The procollected and placed in a warehouse. motors contended that all of the Russian peasants knew how to work in leather and could make their own shoes if they but had the material with which In response to the objection that even to work. if it were practicable to send the shoes they might easily fall into the hands of the Germans, the reply
was always the same; that although there might be a risk of Germany's seizing the goods sent into
Russia, if the United States did nothing at all in Russia's period of greatest distress and need, we
ran the risk that
Germany would
obtain the good-
will of all Russia
and that America would suffer an alienation and misunderstanding from which
we might never
Of course, Anglo-Saxon recover. good sense prevailed in the end and the collected shoes were never sent, although there is no doubt
that even such a
homely expression of good-will would have been most valuable for the future re-
106

between the two countries.
WAR
lations
the discussion I sometimes
famous British ner in 1862 concerning the cotton spinners of Lancashire who were starving owing to the withdrawal of Southern cotton, but who nevertheless held to their principle that slave-grown cotton was an infamy: "Our people will be kept alive by the
contributions of this country but I see that someone in the States had proposed to send something
Throughout remembered what a statesman wrote to Charles Sum-
few cargoes of flour could come, say 50,000 barrels, as a gift from persons in your northern states to the Lancashire workmen, it
to our aid.
If a
would have a prodigious

here."
effect
in
your favor
No one will be able to say how much it might have affected the sentiment toward the United States if such a humble cargo of good will had early left our shores for Russia, how it might have become the harbinger of other cargoes so long delayed
1
CHAPTER
VI.
AFTER WAR WAS DECLARED.
THE first meeting of our national Board, convened after the declaration of war, was in October, 1917, in a beautiful country house at which
the members, arriving
from
New
York, Boston,
Philadelphia, St. Louis and Chicago, appeared as the guests at a house party, none of the friends of
the hostess ever
invited
It
knowing that we had not been
upon a purely social basis. was a blessed relief to be in communication with likeminded people once more and to lose somewhat the sense of social disapprobation and of alienation of which we had become increasingly
three days' deliberation the a special manifesto to the various branches, beginning with the statement:
conscious.
After
Board issued
"All the activities of the Woman's Peace Party have been, of course, modified by the entrance of the United States into the World War. * * * "We have avoided all criticism of our Government as to the declaration of war, and all activities
that could be considered as obstructive in respect
107
io8

and
WAR
to the conduct of the war,
this not as a counsel
of prudence, but as a matter of principle." Because we saw even then that there was an
element of hope in the international administration of food supplies and of other raw materials and clutched at it with something of the traditional desperation of the drowning man, manifesto ended as follows * * * that an alliance
:
the
"We recognize between seventeen nations in both hemispheres cannot be confined to military operations. rejoice in
We
the fact that the United States of
America has
already taken common action with the Allies in regard to the conservation and distribution of food
and other matters, quite outside the military field, which require international cooperation. We venture to hope that conferences of this type
supplies
may
be extended until they develop into an international organization sitting throughout the war. "An interparliamentary conference thus de-
veloped might from the nucleus of a permanent international parliament eventually open to all nations. Such an organization of a World Parliament, arising in response to actual world needs, is in line with the genesis and growth of all permanent political institutions." could not then realize
We
how
very
difficult it
make our position clear, and not time did we sense the control of public long
would be
to
for a
opin-
AFTER WAR WAS DECLARED

ion and of
all
109
propaganda, which
is
considered nec-
essary for the successful inauguration and conduct What we were perhaps totally unpreof war.
pared for as the war continued was the general unwillingness to admit any defect in the institution of war as such, or to acknowledge that, although
exhibiting
some of the noblest
qualities of the hu-
man spirit, it yet affords no solution for vexed international problems; further we believed that after war has been resorted to, its very existence,
in spite of its superb
heroisms and
sacrifices
which
we also greatly admired, tends to obscure and confuse those faculties which might otherwise find a
cuss the very issues for
There was not only a reluctance to diswhich the war was being fought, but it was considered unpatriotic to talk about them until the war had been won. Even in the third month of the war, when asked
solution.
Pacifists in
to give an address before the City Club of Chicago
on "Patriotism and
War
Time,"
tried quite guilelessly to show that while the position of the pacifist in time of war is most difficult,
modern peace movement, since was inaugurated three hundred years ago, had been kept alive throughout many great wars, and that even during the present one some sort of peace organization had been maintained in all of
nevertheless, the
it
the belligerent nations. Our own Woman's International Committee for Permanent Peace had
io

and colonies
WAR
organized branches since the war began in such

fighting nations
as Australia, Austria,
Belgium,
Canada,
Finland,
Germany,
Great
Hungary, British India, Italy, I ventured to hope Russia. Poland and France, the United States would be as tolerant to pacifists in time of war as those countries had been, some of which were fighting for their very existence, and that our fellow-citizens, however divided in opinion, would be able to discuss those aspects of patriotism which endure through all vicissitudes.
Britain, Ireland,
It is easy enough now to smile at its naivete, but even then we were dimly conscious that in the
stir of the heroic moment when a nation enters war, when men's minds almost without volition are driven back to the earliest obligations of
patriotism, the emotions move along the worn grooves of blind admiration for the soldier and of
unspeakable contempt for him who, in the hour of danger, declares that fighting is unnecessary. were not surprised, therefore, when apparently
We
and reversing this popular conof patriotism, we should be called traitors ception and cowards, but it seemed to us all the more necstriking across
essary to demonstrate that in our former advocacy we were urging a reasonable and vital alternative to war. Only slowly did the pacifist realize that
by a
when his fellow countrymen are caught up wave of tremendous enthusiasm and are car-
in
ried out into a high sea of patriotic feeling the very virtues which the pacifist extols are brought
into unhappy contrast to those which war, with its keen sense of a separate national existence, places
in the
foreground. in spite of this sober reasoning it was a distinct shock to me to learn that it had been diffi-
Yet
cult to secure a
chairman to preside over the City Club meeting at which I spoke, and that even my old friends were afraid that the performance of
this simple office
I later
position. the University of Chicago, trying to be as "sweetly reasonable" as possible, but only to come out of
would commit them to my pacifist lectured on the same subject at
the hall profoundly discouraged, having learned the lesson that during war it is impossible for the
pacifist to obtain
we
an open hearing. Nevertheless, continued to talk, not from a desire of self-
defense or justification, I think, for we had since abandoned any such hope, but because
longed actually to modify the headlong course

events.
In the general mass of misunderstanding and

deliberate
misrepresentation harder to bear than others.

accused of wishing to
some things were We were constantly isolate the United States
keep our country out of world politics. of were, course, urging a policy exactly the reverse, that this country should lead the nations of the
to
and
We
ii2

life
WAR
world into a wider
of co-ordinated political activity; that the United States should boldly recognize the fact that the vital political problems
of our time have become as intrinsically international in character as have the commercial and
social
It
problems so closely connected with them. seemed to us that the United States had to her
credit a long account for the spread of democratic institutions during the years when she was at peace
Her own experiment followed quickly by France, and later by Switzerland, and to the south of her a vast continent contains no nation which fails, through
with the rest of the world.
as a republic
was
vicissitudes, to maintain a republican form of government. also hoped to make clear that it has long been the aim of our own government and of similar types throughout the world
many
We
to replace coercion by the full consent of the governed, to educate and strengthen the free will of
the people through the use of democratic institutions; that this age-long process of obtaining the inner consent of the citizen to the outward acts of
his
government is of necessity violently interrupted and thrown back in war time. Then some of us had once dreamed that the
of
this
great nation might at last become united in a vast common endeavor for social ends. hoped that this fus-
cosmopolitan inhabitants
We
ing might be accomplished without the sense of
113
opposition to a common enemy which is an old method of welding people together, better fitted
for military than for social use, adapted to a government resulting from coercion rather than
one founded by free men.
We had also hoped much from the varied popuUnited States; for whether we will or not, our very composition would make it easier for us than for any other nation to establish an international organization founded upon understanding and good will, did we but possess the requisite courage and intelligence to utilize it. There were in this country thousands of emigrants from Central Europe, to whom a war between the United States and the fatherland meant exquisite torture. They and their inheritances were a part of the situation which faced the United States in the spring of 1917; they were a source of great strength in an international venture, as they were undoubtedly a source of weakness in a purely nalation of the
tionalistic
These
ties
position of the old-fashioned sort. of blood, binding us to all the nations
of the earth, afforded, it seemed to us, a unique equipment for a great international task if the United States could but push forward into the
difficult
great
area of internationalism. Then too, the war had already demonstrated that modern
is
warfare
an intimately social and domestic
affair.
The
civilian suffering and, in certain regions, the
ii4
WAR
civilian mortality,
by the soldiers.
low citizens from Poland,
were as great as that endured There were thousands of our felwho could not tear their minds away
Galicia, Syria, Armenia, Serbia, Roumania, Greece, where their own relatives were dying from diseases superinduced by hardship and To such sore and troubled minds war hunger. had come to be a horror which belonged to Europe alone, and was part of that privation and oppression which they had left behind them when they came to America. Newly immigrated Austrian of a dozen nationalities came to their subjects American friends during the weeks of suspense before war was declared, utterly bewildered by the prospect of war. They had heard not three months before that the President of the United
war for so the campaign had been interpreted by many simple minds and they had concluded that whatever happened, some Pacifists more American way would be found.
States did not believe in
hoped that
this
revolution in international re-
lationships which had been steadily approaching for three hundred years and was already long
over-due, could best be obtained after the war, if the United States succeeded in protecting and pre-
We
serving the higher standards of internationalism. were not unmindful of the hope for an inter-
national organization to be formed at the end of But it seemed to us that for thirtythe war.
three
striving to obtain through patriotic wars, that which could finally be secured only through international or-
months Europe had been earnestly
Millions of men, loyal to one interganization. national alliance, were gallantly fighting millions
of
men
cause of Europe's inability to
loyal to another international alliance, bemake an alliance in-
cluding them all. also realized that ever since the European war began, the United States had been conscious
We
had vaguely
of a failure to respond to a moral demand; she felt that she was shirking her share in
a world effort toward the higher good; she had had black moments of compunction and shame for her own immunity and safety. Could she hope
through war to assuage the feverish thirst for action she had felt during all those three years? There is no doubt that she made the correct diagnosis of her case, of her weariness with a selfish, materialistic life and of her need for concerted, But was blood-letting a self-forgetting action.
Would
modern remedy for such a diagnosis? she lose her sense of futility and her consciousness of moral failure, when thousands of
sufficiently
her young
men were
still
Would
was
she not
feel
facing the dangers of war? her inadequacy unless she
able to
embody
in a
permanent organization
the cosmopolitanism which is the essence of her feared she would not be content when spirit?
We
ii6
WAR
was obliged to organize food supplies solely for one group of nations, for the United States owed too much to all the nations of the earth
she
whose sons had developed her raw prairies into allow the women and children of any of them to starve. At that moment the final outcome of the war was apparently to be decided quite as much by food
fertile fields, to
supply as by force of arms. Two terrible questions were in men's minds. Could Germany hold out
during the spring and early

crop was garnered?
summer
until the
new
Could England feed herself were the U-boat campaign in any degree successful? For decades civilized nations had confidently
depended upon other nations for their supply of and of grain until this long continued war had brought the primitive fear of starvation back into the world with so many other elemental tercattle
rors.
Again and again we came back for comfort to the fact that the creation of an international organization of the Allies and Associated Powers for the control of their common food supply, was
It transcending old national bounds. in unification adbe a new of phase political might vance of all former achievements, or it might be one of those shifting alliances merely for war purposes, of which European history affords so
clearly
many
examples.

After war was declared, events moved with
prising rapidity.
117
sur-
We had scarcely returned from
Washington where we had been advocating a referendum on the declaration of war before we
were back there again, this time protesting before the Military Affairs Committee that the measure of conscription should not be passed without an appeal to the country, without an expression of opinion from the simple people who form the rank and file of the soldiery in every war. The most poignant moment during the war and
the preparations for
it,
so far as I personally
was
concerned, came upon me suddenly one morning For after a wretched night of internal debate.
many
years one of the large rooms at Hull-House had been used for a polling place of the precinct, one election after another had been held there for some of which, after the women of Illinois had secured a large measure of the franchise, I had
served as a judge of election.
The room
that
morning was being used to register the men for the first draft. In they came somewhat heavily, one man after another, most of them South ItalI knew many of them had come to this ians. country seeking freedom from military service quite as much as they sought freedom of other sorts, and here they were about to be securely
caught once more.
The
line
of dull
workmen
seemed
to
me
to represent the final frontier of the
n8
WAR
hopes of their kind, the traditional belief in America as a refuge had come to an end and there was no spot on the surface of the earth to which All that had been they might flee for security.
told
them of the American freedom, which they had hoped to secure for themselves and their children, had turned to ashes. I said nothing begreeting, but one of the men He had been in the Hullto me. to speak stopped House citizenship classes, and>only a few months
yond the morning's
had delivered a little address to those of who had received their first papers, combining congratulations with a welcome into the citiThe new citizen zenship of the United States. turned to me and spoke from the bitterness of his
before
I
the class
heart:
"I really have you to thank
if I
am
sent
over to
Europe
to fight.
first
went
into the citizen-
would be exmy papers I could of us knew that none empted." only reply what was going to happen and added, for what comfort it might give him, that at any rate he would be fighting on the side of Italy. But the incident did not add to my peace of mind.
I
ship class in the If 1 hadn't to.
place because you asked
me
now
Partly because one of the residents of Hull-
House served
as
secretary to
the
local
Draft
Board, partly because the men were accustomed to come to the settlement for help of various

kinds,
119
we
assisted
out their questionnaires.
many hundreds of them to fill The docility of the men
was
surprising; they were only too familiar with the whole process and had long ago accepted it as a part of life. The women sometimes begged us
down the ages of the little boys lest it it easier later for the government to make might
not to put
conscript
"They
think
them, and they sometimes added: did this way over there, but we did not
it would be this way over here." When we served luncheons at Hull-House to the young men about to entrain for camp, the women folk were
not admitted but hung in great crowds about the door, men and women alike entangled in a great world process of which they had no conception; it
seemed
to me at moments as if the whole theory of self-government founded upon conscious participation and inner consent, had fallen to the
ground.
Later there were many cases of the immigrant

bewildered and angered by the tax upon his former wages an ex post facto arrangement which was equally trying to the employer and the immigrant, and proved so unworkable that it finally had to be
abandoned.
It was,
however, a
visible sign to the
immigrant that he was suspect and undesirable, although he had come to the country in good faith and sincerely loved America, but loved it perhaps
120

Henry
it
WAR
as Lincoln once said of
cause
It
was
his
own
Clay, "partly beand partly because it was a
free country."
impossible to live for years among immito fail to catch something of their and grants deep-seated hopes for the country of their adoption, to realize that the thought of America has afforded a moral safety valve to generations of oppressed Europeans. War and its conscriptions were something which belonged to the unhappy Europe they had left behind. It was as if their Of the 450,000,000 last throw had been lost. people in Europe 400,000,000 were already involved in the war. Could the United States do nothing more intelligent than to add its quota of
is
100,000,000 people more?
became evident that the measure for conscription would pass, those of us who had
it
When
known something
of the so-called conscientious
objector in England hoped that we might at least obtain similar provisions for him in the United
States.
Although
the
English
tribunals
had
power
service, there
to grant absolute exemption from military were in England at that time ap-
proximately six thousand men imprisoned or interned in addition to the number who were per-
forming non-military service on the continent

such organizations as the Friends' Units.
in
Ambulance
121
committee of us waited upon the Secretary of War, begging him to recommend like provision in the conscription measure then under consideration. The Secretary was ready to talk to our committee, each member of which could claim either acquaintance or friendship with him in the years before the war. He seemed so sympathetic and understanding that possibly we made too
much of
his
somewhat
cryptic
utterance
that
"there would be no conscientious objector problem in the United States," and we left his office
more reassured perhaps than we had any

to be.
It
right
in a very few weeks that no of sort was to be made for the conany provision
became evident
scientious objector as such. jected to war could choose his
Each man who obown method of makIf
ing his protest and be punished accordingly. he failed to report for his assigned camp he
tried as a "deserter," if he refused to put
was on the
uniform, the charge was insubordination; if he declined to drill or to obey an order, he might be
court-martialed under the charge of resisting an officer, with a wide range of penalties, including
imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth.
Thus each
camp had opportunity

objector according to
all
to treat the conscientious
own standard, but above he was to be given no opportunity to make a dignified statement of his own case, no chance "to
its
122

the
WAR
play
I
martyr or
to
hang out the white
War twice again on the a once committee and once alone, but with matter, it was evident that he had taken the same stand
saw the Secretary of
later formulated
by the Administration
in
regard
to other political prisoners, that there could be no such thing as a political offense in a democracy;
each
man was
tried as a criminal.
arrested for breaking a law and Any other course might have
laid the
government open to the charge of suppresThe sing a minority, which was to be avoided. reformer in politics knew only too well how to deal with the reformer out of politics. The latter was
hoist by his own petard. Only after hundreds of
men had been placed in and separated in military camps military prisons under charge of violation of various sections of the military code, was a board appointed to review their cases, beginning work in June, 1919. This federal board endeavored to undo some of the injustices of the camps and to work out a system which, however vulnerable, was removed
from the whim of individuals. The word conscientious objector did not
apply to
to
exactly
many
it is
know,
of these young men whom I came too rigid and too individualistic.
in a
Many
of them felt that
were enveloped
archaic and they profound scepticism as to the
war was

possibility of securing
123
democracy for the world
through destruction of other young men possibly holding the same ideals for the future which they
themselves cherished.
They
believed that any
in-
ternational league would have the best chance of success if it were started when the currents of
brotherhood were flowing more strongly between the nations than is possible immediately after war. I always In various ways I met many of them. if to conform the milieach one to possible urged
When a man himself decided tary regulations. that it was impossible I invariably heard his decisI recall a man ion with a sinking of the heart.
who was one
gated
to
in
of three to object to thousand students in his college.
war out of five He was segre-
an eastern camp and afterwards allowed

the Friends' Service Committee in
work unHer
France, but finding that even non-combatant service did not bring him relief, returned from
abroad preferring imprisonment to what seemed him a dodging of the issue. Another had worked among war prisoners for nine months under the auspices of the Y.M.C.A. He found that he was being suspected of pacifism and was constantly watched and challenged by what amounted to a secret service system within the orto
ganization
itself; it was a great relief for him come home and "face the music," as he put it.
to
The
sort of appeal to
which he and
his high-
124
WAR
minded kind were most persistently subjected could but recall the remark attributed to the emperor Diocletian as he saw the lions in the arena
rip the throat of a
young Christian: "that youth
refused the military oath because his superstition commanded its followers not to bind themselves
These by swearing not to resist evil. wretches enjoy the peace and splendor of
but will not
either."
pitiful
Rome
move
all
In
a finger to protect or to extend the centuries since, the state had
found no better argument with which to coerce its minority who disapproved through religious But the early Christian could at least scruple. frankly call himself a martyr, and although he did not know that his blood would become the seed of the Church, he did know that he was bearing testimony to a new religion destined in time to supersede that of Diocletian; and the emperor
himself,
if
he derided the new
religion,
at the
same time more or

to the
less accurately defined
it.
Such
knowledge might have given Christians of Rome was persistently young denied the conscientious objector in the United
satisfaction as that
States,
and thousands of our fellow citizens to this day quite honestly confuse them with slackers. Their history as inmates of federal prisons is being written and may yet inaugurate a chapter in
prison reform, as the strike so successfully led by them in Leavenworth resulted in a brief trial of
125
The tests self-government for the entire prison. in psychiatry showed that the average mentality of the conscientioius objector had registered well
above that of the drafted
country
in spite of the fact that
men throughout the many of their

war from
number had
inherited their objections to
teachings of simple religious sects and had never individually thought out their positions. Perhaps
these latter at
moments
tasted
martyrdom, but the
more Even
of it. sophisticated the man tied by his wrists to the barred door
cell
men would have none
of his
keep free from
for eight hours a day endeavored to In a letter written to me self-pity.
from Leavenworth prison I find this statement: "We do not think we are martyrs any more
than a soldier taken prisoner by the enemy is a martyr." Because years before I had been somewhat identified with the immigration of the Doukhobortsi, a non-resistant
Russian sect
stoy
had been much

at the
interested, I
in whom Tolfound myself aplittle
pealed to on behalf of a frightened
widow
who was
moment desperately holding at bay the entire military prison system. Her husband had been one of "those obstinate cases who cling
to a scriptural text
and
will not listen to reason."
During
his
long
imprisonments
he had been
finally,
treated in
all sorts
of barbarous ways and
after a prolonged ducking under a faucet in the
126

died.
WAR
con-
prison yard on a freezing day, had contracted
pneumonia and
He
had
originally
and
tinuously taken his stand against putting on the uniform, and when his wife arrived at Leavenworth to take away the body, to her horror she
found that body, at

in a soldier's
last
unable to
resist,
dressed
uniform.
Her
representative
who
came
ness,
to see me, with his
broken English, could
convey but feebly the sense of outrage, of unfairof brutal disregard of the things of the spirit, of the ruthless overriding of personality
which this incident had aroused among thousands of Doukhobortsi. In camp and even in prison the conscientious objectors were constantly subjected to tremendous
pressure by the chaplains to induce them to change their position, although in a sense they were denied the comforts of religion. Certainly the rest I recall going to church one beautiful of us were.
was
summer's day in 1917 when the family whom I visiting urged me to hear a well known Bishop preach in the village church. The familiar words of the service could not be changed but the bishop was belligerent from his very first utterance and his peroration ended with the statement that if "Jesus were living to-day he would be fighting in
the trenches of France."
the world
Not
word
of the anx-
ious, pitying, all-embracing love for lack of
which
was perishing!

It
127
was
inevitable
under these circumstances that
new
religious organizations should develop.
The
Fellowship of Reconciliation had, during 1915, attracted to its membership in Chicago a score of
people, a few clergymen, one or two publicists and others who felt the need of meeting with like-
minded people, and at least comparing their scruples and religious difficulties. We usually met in private houses on a social basis, as it were, not
so
much because we felt that a meeting discussing the teachings of Jesus could be considered "seditious," but from a desire to protect from puband unfriendly discussion the
left us.
licity
was
We
last refuge that did not succeed even in that, al-
though the unfair and hostile publicity came in a very curious way through the office of the Woman's Peace Party, which one would suppose to be more open to attack than the Fellowship.
Throughout the war the national office of the Woman's Peace Party was kept open in a downtown office building in Chicago. We did not re-
move any of our

had nothing
records, being conscious that
we
and our list of members with their addresses was to be found in a conspicuous
to hide,
card catalogue case. It was often far from pleasant to enter the office. If a bit of mail protruded
from the door
it
was frequently spat upon, and
al-
though we rented our quarters in a first class office building on Michigan boulevard facing the lake,
128

door
WAR
the
was
often
befouled
in
hideous
ways.
finally entered the office not directly against us, but against the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which they considered as designed to lessen the morale of war. I have just read over some of the news-
The
secret service
men
in search of material
paper clippings;
it is
easy
now
to smile at their ab-
surd efforts to give a sinister meaning to two such innocuous words as Fellowship and Reconciliation,
but at the
moment we
all
knew
that
it
meant one more group put upon the index, as it were, and one more successful attempt to discredit pacifists. The only defense which in the least appealed to the newspaper men was made
by one of themselves to the
reconciliation
effect that the
word
sound and purport to the word conciliation and that Nicholas Murray Butler was chairman of an organization to promote international arbitration and conciliation, and that every one knew he was for the war The Fellowship of course continued and fortunately was never disturbed in New York where
like in
I
was very
its
national office
was
located.
As
its
member of
meetings as often as possible and always found a certain healing of the spirit.
the executive board I attended
The
conception of solidarity, of a
new heaven
a
and a new earth to be achieved by
band of

brothers leagued against the world,
is
129
in a certain
measure always found among the adherents of an unpopular cause. At the annual meeting in 1919, held at a boys' school on the Hudson, it was clear from the addresses of the members and their conferences together, that the .teachings of Jesus might well lead to difficult positions in regard to the industrial conflict as well as to international
wars, and that the use of violence was as inadmisOne of the sible in one place as in the other.
young clergymen there had played a leading role in the Lawrence strike, another had identified himwith a group of striking workmen in PatterNo one there who had been a son, New Jersey. pacifist in war time minimized the difficulties
self
ahead of these young men, yet they received only congratulations upon the fact that they had been able to clarify their positions and to find a clear
line
of action.
One group was
publishing a
journal, another announced the opening of a new school, a third was still doing all possible to secure
legal protection for men upon whom the espionage act had fallen with unusual severity.
fourth annual meeting of the Woman's Peace Party was held in Philadelphia, at the
Friends'
The
Meeting House,
in
Again we urged each other
to
December 1917. promote the spirit
of good will : "Let those of opposed opinions be loyal to the highest that they know, and let each
130

work
WAR
understand that the other

otic;" to
may be equally patrifor a League of Nations and to carry on the old effort to substitute law for war. It was interesting to observe at the Phila-
delphia meeting in how many ways the members of the Woman's Peace Party had found "the ano-
dyne of work" as a help to holding fast to their

convictions.
national secretary, Mrs. Mead, reported her wartime addresses in many states where, with
the use of tact, she found no difficulty "even in a
1 '
The
very super-heated atmosphere in speaking upon "The New Preparedness," "After the War,
What?"
lar topics.
entitled
"Civic Efficiency in Wartime," and simiMany others were lecturing on the
food question; Miss Balch had published a book "Some Approaches to the Great Settlement," but for the most part work was difficult and decreased in volume. It was only at the very closing hour of the meeting that an agent came from the Department of
Justice.
Quaker lady who was acting for the conference politely asked as doorkeeper him to wait a few minutes, as the conference was
little
its closing minutes to silent prayer, fallthe into custom of the meeting house under ing
The
devoting
whose hospitable roof it was gathered. When he showed his credentials, she of course allowed him
to
open the door, but one look apparently
satis-

fied
131
him, and but for the headlines in the papers next morning we should never have known of his
presence. From the
same source we learned that the agent
meant
to listen to
my
talk about "America's Obli-
gation and the World's Food Supply" in the chapel of the Friends College at Swarthmore the next day. Candor compels me to state that al-
though he was pointed out to me I quickly forgot all about him, as I looked over the goodly group of young people, many of whom were preparing to enter the reconstruction work in France which the Friends Service Committee had inaugurated. Some of them were sent to Russia and Poland, and later on under the Hoover organization, fed the hungry in many countries of Europe. They were trying to find "the moral equivalent of war," although many of them with divided convictions and
with heavy hearts.
CHAPTER
VII.
PERSONAL REACTIONS DURING WAR.
AFTER
the TTnitp^ St atpg
t^
pnfprpj^hp war
there began to appear great divergence among th^m-my ryprn "f p-Hf^, from the extreme left,
composed of
non-resistants, through the middleof-the-road groups, to the extreme right, who
could barely be distinguished from mild militarists. There were those people, also, who although they
felt keenly both the horror and the futility of war, yet hoped for certain beneficent results from the opportunities afforded by the administration of
war; they were much pleased when the government took over the management of the railroads,
insisting that governmental ownership had thus been pushed forward by decades; they were also sure that the War Labor Policies Board, the Coal
Commission and similar war
institutions
would
make an enormous
difference in the
development
of the country, in short, thatjaiilLtajcism might be used as an instrument f-nr advanflrd 'snrial fnrfc
Such
even
justifications
had
their lure
all
old pacifist friends on

in the
and one found the war boards and

itself.
war department
133
Certainly
we
PERSONAL REACTIONS DURING

were
all
WAR
133
eager to accept whatever progressive changes came from the quick reorganization demanded by war, and doubtless prohibition was one of these, as the granting of woman suffrage
social
majority of the belligerent nations, was another. But some of us had suspected that social
in the
depends as much upon the process which it is secured as upon the result itthrough self; if railroads are nationalized solely in order to secure rapid transit of ammunition and men to
advance
points of departure for Europe,
when that governmental need no longer exists what more natural than that the railroads should no longer be man-
aged by the government? My temperament and habit had always kept me rather in the middle of the road in politics as well as in social reform I had been for "the best possible." But now I was pushed far toward the left on the subject of the war and I became gradually convinced that in order to make the position
;
of the pacifist clear it was perhaps necessary that at least a small number of us should be forced into
an unequivocal position. If I sometimes regretted having gone to the Woman's Congress at The Hague in 1915, or having written a book on
Newer
my
Ideals of Peace in 1911 which had made position so conspicuously clear, certainly far
oftener I was devoutly grateful that I had used such unmistakable means of expression before the
134

when any spoken or
WAR
written word in the was forbidden. It was on my return from The Hague Congress in July, 1915, that I had my first experi-
time came
interests of Peace
ence of the determination on the part of the press to make pacifist activity or propaganda so absurd
that
its
it
would be absolutely without
influence
and
authors so discredited that nothing they might say or do would be regarded as worthy of attention.
I
for
many
had been accustomed to newspaper men years and had come to regard them as a
fraternity, sometimes ignorant of the subject on which they asked an interview, but
good natured
usually quite ready to report faithfully albeit someHull-House had several what sensationally.
times been the subject of sustained and inspired newspaper attacks, one, the indirect result of an
exposure of the
inefficient sanitary service in the
Chicago Health Department had lasted for many months; I had of course known what it was to serve unpopular causes and throughout a period of
campaigning for the Progressive Party I had naturally encountered the "opposition press" in
various parts of the country, but this concerted
and deliberate attempt

'was quite
at misrepresentation
all
on
the part of newspapers of
shades of opinion
After the experience. United States entered the war, the press throughin
new
my
out the country systematically undertook to mis-
PERSONAL REACTIONS DURING WAR
135
represent and malign pacifists as a recognized part! of propaganda and as a patriotic duty. came
We
to regard this misrepresentation as part of the war technique and in fact an inevitable consequence of
war
itself,
but
we were slow
in the
very beginning
to recognize the situation, and I found experience which came long before the
my
first
United
States entered the
war rather overwhelming.
Upon
tional
our return from the

at
in
Congress
organization
Woman's InternaThe Hague in 1915, our local New York City with others,
notably a group of enthusiastic college men, had arranged a large public meeting in Carnegie Hall.
Dr. Anna
Howard Shaw
made
in
States delegates
presided and the United a public report of our im-
stricken Europe" and of the pressions moral resources in the various countries we visited
"war
that might possibly be brought to bear against a continuation of the war. had been much im-
We
pressed with the fact that it was an old man's war, that the various forms of doubt and opposition to
war had no method of public expression and that many of the soldiers themselves were far from enthusiastic in regard to actual fighting as a method of settling international difficulties. War was to many of them much more anachronistic than to
the elderly statesmen who were primarily responsible for the soldiers' presence in the trenches. It was the latter statement which was my un-
I 36

it
WAR
doing, for in illustration of

tically
I said that in prac-
every country we had
visited,
we had heard
a certain type of young soldier say that it had been difficult for him to make the bayonet
charge (enter into actual hand to hand fighting) unless he had been stimulated; that the English
soldiers
the
had been given rum before such a charge, Germans ether and that the French were said
to use absinthe.
it
To
those
who heard
the address
was
men
had
quite clear that it was not because the young flinched at the risk of death but because they
to be inflamed to
do the brutal work of the
bayonet, such as disembowelling, and were obliged to overcome all the inhibitions of civilization.
Dr. Hamilton and
had notes for each of these

it
statements with the dates and names of the
who had made
them, and
did not occur

startling.
men to me
was,
that the information
was new or
however, reported to have said that no soldier could go into a bayonet charge until he was made
half drunk, and this in turn was immediately commented upon, notably in a scathing letter written to the New York Times by Richard Harding Davis, as a most choice specimen of a woman's Mr. Davis himself had sentimental nonsense. returned from Europe and at once berecently defender of the heroic soldiers who were came the
being traduced and belittled. He lent the weight of his name and his very able pen to the cause,

but
it
137
needed neither, for the misstatement was repeated, usually with scathing comment, from one end of the country to the other.
really
conscious, of course, that the story had struck athwart the popular and long-cherished conception of the nobility and heroism of the solI
was
dier as such, and it seemed to me at the time that there was no possibility of making any explanation, at least until the sensation
what
sober
subsided.
should have somehave might repeated my more statements with the explanation that
I
whomsoever the pacifist held responsible for war, it was certainly not the young soldiers themselves who were, in a sense, its most touching victims,
"the heroic youth of the world
ideal
tragically
whom
common
pitted against each other." Youth's response to the appeal made to their selfsacrifice, to their patriotism, to their sense of duty,
to their high-hearted hopes for the future, could only stir one's admiration, and we should have
been dull indeed had we failed to be moved by

this
most moving spectacle
in the
world.
That
they had so responded to the higher appeals only confirms Ruskin's statement that "we admire the soldier not because he goes forth to slay but to be
slain."
obliged to
The fact that many of them were make a great effort to bear themselves
had nothing whatever
gallantly in the final tests of "war's brutalities" to do with their courage
138
and sense of devotion. All this, of course, we had realized during our months in Europe. After the meeting in Carnegie Hall and after an interview with President Wilson in Washington, I returned to
in the
Chicago to a public meeting arI was met at the train Auditorium ranged by a committee of aldermen appointed as a result of a resolution in the City Council. There was an
;
indefinite feeling that the
meeting at
The Hague
might turn out to be of significance, and that in such an event its chairman should have been honored by her fellow citizens. But the bayonet had and story preceded me every one was filled with great uneasiness. To be sure, a few war correspondents had come to my rescue writing
of the overpowering smell of ether preceding certain German attacks; the fact that English sol-
knew when a bayonet charge was about to be ordered because rations of rum were distributed
diers
along
the
trenches.
Some people began
to
suspect that the story, exaggerated and grotesque as it had become, indicated not cowardice but
merely an added sensitiveness which the modern soldier was obliged to overcome. Among the many letters on the subject which filled my mail for weeks, the bitter and abusive were from civilians or from the old men to whom war experiences
had become
a reminiscence, the larger
WAR
139
number and the most understanding ones came from soldiers in active service.
Only once did
an address
in
I try a
public explanation.
Chautauqua,
New
York,
in
After which I
had not mentioned bayonets, I tried to remake my original statement to a young man of the associated press only to find it once more so garbled that
I gave up in despair, quite unmoved by the young man's letter of apology which followed hard upon
the published report of his interview. I will confess that the mass psychology of the
situation interested
me
ill
even then and continued

with a serious attack of
to
do so
until I fell
pleuro-pneumonia, which was the beginning of three years of semi-invalidism. During weeks of
feverish discomfort I experienced a bald sense of
opprobrium and wide-spread misunderstanding which brought me very near to self pity, perhaps the lowest pit into which human nature can sink. Indeed the pacifist in war time, with
social
his precious cause in the
keeping of those
who
con-
trol
patriotic duty to
the sources of publicity and consider it a make all types of peace propa-
ganda obnoxious, constantly faces two dangers. Strangely enough he finds it possible to travel from the mire of self pity straight to the barren hills of self-righteousness and to hate himself
equally in both places.
140
WAR
From
the
the very beginning of the great war, as
members of our group gradually became defined from the rest of the community, each one
felt
increasingly
the
sense
of
isolation
which
rapidly developed after the United States entered the war into that destroying effect of "aloneness,"
if I
may
so describe the opposite of
mass conscious-
ness.
We never ceased to miss the unquestioning
comradeship experienced by our fellow citizens during the war, nor to feel curiously outside the enchantment given to any human emotion when it The force of the is shared by millions of others. so that it seemed not was majority overwhelming only impossible to hold one's own against it, but at moments absolutely unnatural, and one secretly
yearned to participate
kind."
in
"the folly of
all
man-
Our modern democratic
teaching has
brought us to regard popular impulses as possessing in their general tendency a valuable capacity for evolutionary development. In the hours of doubt and self-distrust the question again and
again arises, has the individual or a very small group, the right to stand out against millions of
Is there not a great countrymen? value in mass judgment and in instinctive mass enthusiasm, and even if one were right a thousand times over in conviction, was he not absolutely wrong in abstaining from this communion with his The misunderstanding on the part of fellows?
his fellow
WAR
141
old friends and associates and the charge of lack of patriotism was far easier to bear than those dark periods of f aint-heartedness. gradually ceased to state our position as we became con-
We
it served no practical purpose and, than worse that, often found that the immediate
vinced that
result
was provocative.
We could not, however, lose the conviction that

as all other
tion
forms of growth begin with a variafrom the mass, so the moral changes in human
also begin with a differing group or insometimes with the one who at best is dividual, designated as a crank and a freak and in sterner moments is imprisoned as an atheist or a traitor. Just when the differing individual becomes the
affairs
may
centro-egotist,
the
insane
man, who must be
thrown out by society for

impossible to state.
its
own
protection,
it is
The
pacifist
was constantly
brought sharply up against a genuine human trait with its biological basis, a trait founded upon the instinct to dislike, to distrust and finally to destroy
the individual
who
differs
from
the
mass
in
time
of danger.
of Regarding for self-preservation it becomes perfectly natural the mass to call sucR an individual a traitor and to insist that if he is not for the nation he is
this trait as the basis
an estimated nine million people can bear witness who have been burned as witches and heretics, not by mobs, for of the peoagainst
it.
To
this
142
pie

who have been
WAR
"lynched" no record has been kept, but by order of ecclesiastical and civil courts.
There were moments when the pacifist yielded to the suggestion that keeping himself out of war, refusing to take part in its enthusiasms, was but
pure quietism, an acute failure to adjust himself to the moral world. Certainly nothing was clearer than that the individual will was helpless and irwere constantly told by our friends relevant.
We
that to stand aside from the
war mood of the
country was
cide,
to surrender all possibility of future influence, that we were committing intellectual sui-
ble people or judicious advisers. differ with able statesmen, with
and would never again be trusted as responsiWho were we to
men
of sensitive
conscience who also absolutely abhorred war, but were convinced that this war for the preservation of democracy would make all future wars impossible, that the priceless values of civilization which were at stake could at this moment be saved only by war? But these very dogmatic statements
Was not war in the inspurred one to alarm. terest of democracy for the salvation of civilization a contradiction of terms,
however often
Then,
too,
it
whoever was repeated?
said
it
or
afraid of fanaticism, of preferring a consistency of theory to the conscientious recognition of the social situation, of a
we were always

failure to
WAR
143
meet
life in
the temper of a practical
person. Every student of our time had become more or less a disciple of pragmatism and its great
teachers in the United States had
war and defended

philosophic acumen.
their positions with skill
come out for the and There were moments when
one longed desperately for reconciliation with one's friends and fellow citizens; in the words of Amiel, "Not to remain at variance with existence but to reach that understanding of life which enables us at least to obtain forgiveness."
Solitude
has always had its demons, harder to withstand than the snares of the world, and the unnatural desert into which the pacifist was summarily cast out seemed to be peopled with them. sorely
We
missed the contagion of mental activity, for we are all much more dependent upon our social environment and daily newspaper than perhaps any
of us realize.
We
also doubtless encountered, al-
though subconsciously, the temptations described by John Stuart Mill "In respect to the persons and affairs of their own day, men insensibly adopt the modes of feeling and judgment in which they
:
can hope for sympathy from the company they

keep."
The
lost only in
consciousness of spiritual alienation was moments of comradeship with the like
minded, which
may
explain the tendency of the

pacifist in
,
WAR
war time
to seek his intellectual kin, his
spiritual friends, wherever they in his own country or abroad.

It
might be found
respects the
was
inevitable that in
many
peace cause should suffer in public opinion from the efforts of groups of people who, early in the
war, were convinced that the country as a whole was for peace and who tried again and again to discover a method for arousing and formulating I was ill and out of the sentiment against war.
Chicago when the People's Council held a national convention there, which was protected by the city
police but threatened with dispersion
by the state
troops, who, however, arrived from the capital several hours after the meeting had adjourned.
The
more
was most sensational and no one was surprised than many of the members of the People's Council who thus early in the war had supposed that they were conducting a perfectly
incident
The incident gave trelegitimate convention. mendous "copy" in a city needing rationalizing rather than sensationalizing at that moment.
There
is
no doubt that the shock and terror of the
"anarchist riots" occurring in Chicago years ago have left their traces upon the nervous system of
the city
in
as a nervous shock experienced determine the action afterwards youth of a mature man under widely different circumwill long
somewhat
stances.
145
On the whole, the New York groups were much more active and throughout the war were allowed much more freedom both of assembly and press,
severe reaction followed expressed through the Lusk Committee and other agencies. Certainly neither city approximated
although later
freedom of London and nothing surprised me more in 1915 and again in 1919 than the freedom
the
of speech permitted there. also read with a curious eagerness the steadily increasing number of books published fromt time to time during the war, which brought a re-
We
newal of one's faith or at least a touch of comfort. These books broke through that twisting and suppressing of awkward truths, which was encouraged and at times even ordered by the censorship. Such manipulation of news and motives was doubtof war propaganda be kept in a fighting mood. Perhaps the most vivid books came from France, early from Romain Holland, later from
less necessary in the interest
if
the
people were
to
many
Barbusse, although it was interesting to see how people took the latter's burning indictment of war merely as a further incitement against the
the scientific side were the frequent writings of David Starr Jordan and the remarkable book of Nicolai on "The Biology of War."
enemy.
On
The
latter enabled one, at least in one's own mind, to refute the pseudo-scientific statement that war
146

man must
WAR
neces-
was valuable
in securing the survival of the fittest.
Nicolai insisted that primitive
sarily have been a peaceful and social animal and that he developed his intelligence through the use of the tool, not through the use of the weapon; it was the primeval community which made the evolution of man possible, and cooperation among <'men is older and more primitive than mass combat which is an outgrowth of the much later prop-
icrty instinct.
j
No other
own
species save ants,
who
also
possess property, fights in
masses of
its
kind.
masses against other War is in fact not a
natural process and not a struggle for existence in the evolutionary sense. He illustrated the
evolutionary survival of the fittest by two tigers .inhabiting the same jungle or feeding ground, the .one who has the greater skill and strength as a
ihunter survives and the other starves, but the strong one does not go out to kill the weak
one, as the
war propagandist
implied; or by
two
varieties of mice living in the same field or barn; Jin the biological struggle, the variety which grows
a thicker coat survives the winter while the other variety freezes to extinction, but i'f one variety of mice should go forth to kill the other, it would
be absolutely abnormal and quite outside the evolutionary survival which is based on the adjustment of the organism to its environment. George Nasmyth's book on Darwinism and the Social Order

was another
147
clear statement of the mental con-
fusion responsible for the insistence that even a Mr. biological progress is secured through war.
Brailsford wrote constantly on the economic results of the war and we got much comfort
from John Hobson's "Toward International Government," which gave an authoritative account
of the enormous amount of
human
activity actu-
ally carried on through international organizations of all sorts, many of them under govern-
mental control.
Lowes Dickenson's books, espethe cially spirited challenge in "The Choice Before left his readers with the distinct impression Us,"
"war is not inevitable but proceeds from defiand removable causes." From every such book the pacifist was forced to the conclusion that
that
nite
none save those interested in the realization of an idea are in a position to bring it about and that if one found himself the unhappy possessor of an unpopular conviction, there was nothing for it but to think as clearly as he was able and be in a position to serve his country as soon as it was possible for him to do so. But with or without the help of good books
a hideous sensitiveness remained, for the pacifist, like the rest of the world, has developed a high de-
gree of suggestibility, sharing that consciousness of the feelings, the opinions and the customs of
his
own
social
group which
is
said to be an inheri-
i 48
WAR
tance
stinct
from an almost pre-human past. An inwhich once enabled the man-pack to survive
it
when
was
off
perishing
a question of keeping together or of the face of the earth, is perhaps not

in
is
any of us. There moral strain when physical as well as
underdeveloped
is
a distinct
this instinct
steadily suppressed or at least ignored.
The
large
number of deaths among the older
warring nations can probably be traced in some measure to the peculiar strain which such maladjustment implies. More than the normal amount of nervous energy must be
pacifists in all the
consumed in holding one's own in a hostile world. These older men, Kier Hardie and Lord CourtEngland, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Rauchenbusch, Washington Gladden in the United States, Lammasch and Fried in Austria, had been hon-
ney
in
ored by their fellow citizens because of marked Sudability to interpret and understand them.
denly to find every public utterance wilfully misconstrued, every attempt at normal relationship repudiated, must react in a baffled suppression
which
is health-destroying even if we do not accept the mechanistic explanation of the human system. Certainly by the end of the war we were able to
understand, although our group certainly did not endorse the statement of Cobden, one of the most convinced of all internationalists "I made up my
:
mind during
the
Crimean
War that
if
ever
I lived

in the time of
149
another great war of a similar kind between England and another power, I would not as a public man open my mouth on the subject, so
convinced
am I that appeals to reason, conscience or interest have no force whatever on parties enin
gaged
war, and that exhaustion on one or both
sides can alone bring a contest of physical force to an end."
On
we
the other
hand there were many times when
stubbornly asked ourselves, what after all, has maintained the human race on this old globe despite all the calamities of nature
and
all
the tragic
failings of mankind,
ities,
many by a man who,
not faith in new possibiland courage to advocate them. Doubtless times these new possibilities were declared
if
quite unconscious of courage, bore the "sense of being an exile, a condemned crimi-
nal, a fugitive
from mankind."
Did every one
so feel who, in order to travel on his own proper path had been obliged to leave the traditional
highway? The pacifist, during the period of the war could answer none of these questions but he was sick at heart from causes which to him were hidden and impossible to analyze. He was at times devoured by a veritable dissatisfaction with
life.
Was
he thus bearing his share of blood-
guiltiness, the
inexplicable suicide
We certainly
morbid sense of contradiction and which modern war implies? had none of the internal contentment
150
WAR
of the doctrinnaire, the ineffable solace of the No one self-righteous which was imputed to us.
knew better than we how
feeble and futile
we were
against the impregnable weight of public opinion, the appalling imperviousness, the coagulation of motives, the universal confusion of a world at
war.
type of statement:
There was scant solace to be found in this "The worth of every convic-
tion consists precisely in the steadfastness with which it is held," perhaps because we suffered
we were no longer living in a and were therefore in no posidogma tion to announce our sense of security We were well aware that the modern liberal having come to conceive truth of a kind which must vindicate itself in practice, finds it hard to hold even a sincere and mature opinion which from the very nature of things can have no justification in works.
from
the fact that
period of
The
pacifist in
war time
is
literally starved of
any
gratification of that natural desire to have his
own
decisions justified by his fellows. That, perhaps, was the crux of the situation.
We
slowly became aware that our affirmation was were thrust into regarded as pure dogma.
We
the position of the doctrinnaire, and although,
had
we been
toric
permitted,
we might have
cited both his-
and
scientific tests
of our so-called doctrine
of Peace, for the moment any sanction even by way of illustration was impossible.

It therefore
151
came about that ability to hold out [ mass suggestion, to honestly differ from against the convictions and enthusiasms of one's best I friends did in moments of crisis come to depend / upon the categorical belief that a man's primary/ allegiance is to his vision of the truth and that he
is
under obligation to affirm
it.
CHAPTER
VIII
IN EUROPE DURING THE ARMISTICE

with a resolution passed at our Hague Congress 1915, "that our next Congress should be held at the time and place of the official Peace
line in
IN
Conference," each of the national sections had appointed a committee of five, who were to start for
the place of the Peace Conference as soon as the
arrangements were announced.
They were then
to cable back to the selected twenty delegates and ten alternates in each country, who were to follow as quickly as preparations could be
made.
It
was
assumed in 1915, not only by ourselves, but largely by the rest of the world, that the Peace Conference would be held in a neutral country, probably at The Hague, and that both sides would be represented there.
women it was borne mind that the official Conference at the end of the war determining the terms of peace would
In planning a congress of
in
be largely composed of diplomats who are necessarily bound by the traditional conventions which have so long dominated all intercourse between nations. Because in every country such men are
152
IN
EUROPE DURING THE ARMISTICE
153
seldom representative of modern social thought and the least responsive to changing ideas, it was
considered supremely important that when the conference of diplomats should come together, other groups should convene in order to urge the
importance of certain interests which have hitherto been inarticulate in international affairs. This need had been recognized not only by the women but by international organizations of labor, by
the Zionists and similar groups,
who were
also
planning to hold Congresses
at the
and
in the
same place
as the official
same time Peace Con-
ference After the
League of Nations, the gathering together of experts and scholars as aids to the official Peace Commissioners had
for a
War. The tremendous movement
of course
all
The Hague
affairs.
in
developed after our Congress at 1915, but all the more did we hope
for a great spiritual awakening in international recalled that it was at the Congress of
We
Vienna
in
1815 after the Napoleonic wars that the
nations represented there, as part of their overwhelming demand for a more highly moralized
future, insisted that the diplomats should
make
international provision for abolishing the slave trade.
When
it
was announced that the Peace

all
Confer-,
ence would assemble in Paris
Woman's Congress
fell
the plans for our It was necesthrough.
154

meet
in a neutral
WAR
sary, of course, for us to
country
as naturally the women from the Central Powers could not go to France. This inevitable change
of place involved
there were also
much
cabling and delay, and
regard to passneutral for Switzerland. even ports The group of American delegates arriving in
Paris at Easter, 1919 found that the English passports had been delayed and that the brilliant presi-
some
difficulties in
dent of our French Section and her fellow
officers
had been refused
After various meetings in Paris, at which the French, English and American sections were well represented, the Congress
theirs.
was finally arranged
for
May
12, at Zurich.
Curi-
ously enough, after our many delays, we at last met in the very week when the Peace Conference
in Paris
had become enlarged beyond the member-
ship of the Allied and neutral nations by receiving the delegates from the Central Powers, and when
in a sense the official
Peace Conference as such
had formally begun. Our fortnight of delay in Paris was spent in conference with our French
colleagues, in interviews with various persons connected both with the Peace Conference and the
Food Administration, and by some

days' visit to the
of us in a
five-
made
devastated regions, which was by automobile, kindly arranged for us by the

after
American Red Cross.
Day
day as
rain,
snow and
sleet
fell
IN
EUROPE DURING'THE ARMISTICE
155
steadily from a leaden sky, we drove through lands laid waste and still encumbered by mounds
shells, broken down tanks and incredibly huge tangles of rusty barbed wire. The ground was furrowed in all directions by trenches and shell holes, we passed through ruined towns and villages in which no house had been left standing, although at times a grey head would emerge from a cellar which had been rudely roofed with bits of corrugated iron. It was the old had come back who first, always people for they least of all could brook the life of refugees. There had not yet been time to gather the dead into cemeteries, but at Vimy Ridge colored troops from the United States were digging rows of graves for the bodies being drawn toward them In the Argonne we still saw in huge trucks.
of munitions, exploded
clusters of
wooden
of clay, each cross with

tion.
I
crosses surmounting the heaps its metal tag for inscrip-
had
oldest
a personal interest in these graves for nephew had fallen in the Argonne.
my
We
but,
searched for his grave through one long afternoon owing to the incompleteness of our map and
the fact that there
in the village nearest the
was no living soul to consult farm on which the battle

failed to find
it.
had been fought, we
We
met;
other people on the same errand, one a French Cure who knew the ground with a sad intimacy.
156
WAR
We
Service
ters of the reconstruction
spent the following night at the headquarwork of the Friends'
Committee
in
devastated France, where
the work of both the English and American units was being supervised by Edward Harvey, who had been Canon Barnett's successor as Warden,
of Toynbee Hall. After an evening of talk to which the young men had come in from all the outlying villages where they were constructing temporary houses for the refugees who had returned,
or plowing the fields for those who had not yet arrived, or supplying necessities to those who had come back too ill to begin their regular course of living, four of us who had long been identified
with settlements sat by a small open
fire
and
tried
to disentangle the moral situation into which the war had thrown those who could not consider it
legitimate, yet felt acutely the call to service on behalf of its victims and the full measure of pity
for the colossal devastation and helpless misery. In the morning one of the Friends went with us
to the region
the day before, and abandoned the motor in the early shell wrecked road, he finally found the farm and grave we sought, the third in one of three long
we had searched
although we
rows. /* On
the
I
May
6,
Woman's
1915, the Executive Committee of International Committee for Perin
\jnanent
Peace met
Zurich to prepare the agenda
IN
of

the
157
The members represented Congress. of women who, living in fourteen differgroups ent nations of the neutral, the Entente and the
Central Powers, had found themselves opposed
to the full tide of public opinion throughout the war. That a curious fellowship had developed
between these widely scattered groups was revealed from time to time when committee members recounted, merely by way of explanation in regard to incomplete records or absent delegates,
such similar experiences with governmental espionage as to demonstrate without doubt that war
methods are
identical in all nations.
Without
ex-
planation or asseveration we also discovered how like-minded we were when resolutions on the same
subject, coming in from one country after another, were so similar in intent that the five sub-committees who sorted and combined and translated the material were often perplexed to decide which resolution most clearly expressed that which was common to them all, which one best reflected something of what we had learned and hoped through
the poignant suffering of the past five years. In one sense these resolutions gave a cross-cut section,
although
in a business-like
form, as
it
were
of
the hopes maturing in many countries, including those so lately at war, for "permanent arrangements that justice shall be rendered and peace
maintained."
We knew that
there would be
diffi-
158

in
WAR
holding an international Congress so soon after the war, but in all humility of spirit we claimed that we essayed the task free from any
culties
rancorous memories, from wilful misunderstanding or distrust of so-called enemies.
Therefore in reply to the often repeated prediction that the Congress was premature and that the attempt would end in disaster, which was made
not only
in the United States but still oftener by American women in Paris who were sensitive to
the hostility
tiations,
still
the
we women eligible
suffered too
prevailing during the peace negocould only state our conviction that
to
membership
in the
Congress
the war, had been too close to the clarifying spirit of reality to indulge in any sentimental or unconsidered state-
had
much during
ments.
Yet
inevitably
we
felt a certain restraint
self-
when we considered
to face.
I
consciousness would perhaps be a better word seeing the "alien enemy" face
many of the experiences were own when walking the streets of my Zurich the day we arrived I turned a corner and suddenly met one of the Austrian women who had been a delegate to The Hague Congress and had
imagine
similar to
afterwards shown us every courtesy in Vienna when we presented our Neutral Conference plan.
She was so shrunken and changed that I had much difficulty in identifying her with the beautiful
IN
159
woman
I had seen three years before. She was not only emaciated as by a wasting illness, lookshe ing as if she needed immediate hospital care
did in fact die three months after her return to
Vienna
but her face and artist's hands were cov-
ered with rough red blotches due to the long use of soap substitutes, giving her a cruelly scalded first reaction was one of overappearance.
My
pity and alarm as I suddenly discovered friend my standing at the very gate of death. This was quickly followed by the same sort of indigna-
whelming
tion I
had
first felt in
children at Lille.
What were we
the presence of the starving all about that
such things were allowed to happen in a so-called civilized world? Certainly all extraneous differences
from us as we stood together in the sunshine and spoke of the coming Congress spring
fell
which, feeble as it was, yet gave a demonstration that a few women were to be found in each country
who
could not brook that such a state of af-
the evening meeting preceding the opening of the Congress this dying woman told us that many Austrian
fairs
should go unchallenged.
At
women had
resented not so
much
the starvation
itself as the fact that
day after day they
had been
ject of procuring
obliged to keep their minds steadily on the subfood until all other objects for
the horror living were absolutely excluded. and anxieties of war had been added the sordid-
To
160
WAR
ness of sheer animal hunger with its inhibitions. She spoke in the white marble hall of the University
of Zurich.
a
The same meeting was
addressed
delegate and by an American who by had both come back to the University which had given them doctor's degrees. What a welcome they received from the Swiss people! We had almost forgotten what it was like to be in a neutral country where it entailed no odium to be a
German
pacifist.
After the formal opening of the Congress had been disposed of, the first resolution proposed was on the famine and blockade. It was most
eloquently presented by Mrs. Pethwick Lawrence of England and went through without a dissenting vote:
"This International Congress of
Women
regards the famine, pestilence and unemployment extending throughout the great tracts of Central and Eastern Europe and into Asia
as a disgrace to civilization. "It therefore urges the Governments of all the Powers assembled at the Peace Conference immediately to develop the inter-
war
allied organizations formed for purposes of into an international organization for
purposes of peace, so that the resources of the
world
materials, finance, transavailable for the relief port of the peoples of all countries from famine
food,
raw
shall be
made
and
pestilence.
IN EUROPE
DURING THE ARMISTICE
161
"To this end it urges that immediate action be taken : "i. To raise the blockade; and "2. If there is insufficiency of food or
transport
"a.
;
To
prohibit the use of transport
from
one country to another for the conveyance of luxuries until the necessaries of life are
supplied to all peoples; "b. To ration the people of every country so that the starving may be fed. "The Congress believes that only immediate international action on these lines can save humanity and bring about the permanent reconciliation and union of the peoples."
The resolution in full was telegraphed to Paris and we received a prompt reply from President Wilson. The public reception of this telegram
was one of the most striking moments of the Congress and revealed once more the reverence with
which all Europe regarded the President of the United States. As the university hall was too
small for the increasing attendance, we held our last evening meetings in the largest church in the
As I stood in the old-fashioned high pulpit to announce the fact that a telegram had been received from President Wilson, there fell a hush,
city.
a sense of tension on the great audience that is

difficult to describe.
It
was
as if out of the con-
162

was about
to be heard.
WAR
Europe one authoritative Although the telegram itself but expressed sympathy with our famine resolution, and regret that the Paris Convoice
fusion and misery of
ference could not act upon its suggestions, there arose from the audience a sigh of religious resignation, as if a good man were doing his best and
in the
end must succeed.

the Congress
As
was
had received through our press

very day the treaty was naturally in a position to be
correspondent an advance copy of the treaty and

in actual session the
made
public,
we were
the very first public
body to
discuss
its
terms.
We
certainly spoke out unequivocally in a series of resolutions, beginning as follows:
"This International Congress of Women expresses its deep regret that the Terms of Peace proposed at Versailles should so seriously violate the principles upon which alone a just and lasting peace can be secured, and which the democracies of the world had come
to accept."
the fruits of the secret the conquerors, the Terms of Peace tacitly sanction secret diplomacy, deny the principles of self-determination, recognize the right of the victors to the spoils of war, and create all over Europe discords and animosities, which can only lead to future wars. "By the demand for the disarmament of
"By guaranteeing
to
treaties
IN EUROPE
163
one set of belligerents only, the principle of

justice is violated
and the rule of force con-
tinued.
"By the financial and economic proposals a hundred million people of this generation in the heart of Europe are condemned to poverty, disease and despair which must result in the spread of hatred and anarchy within each nation. "With a deep sense of responsibility this Congress strongly urges the Allied and Associated Governments to accept such amendments of the Terms, as shall bring the peace into harmony with those principles first enumerated by President Wilson upon the faithful carrying out of which the honor of the Allied peoples depends."
It was creditable to the patience of the peace makers in Paris that they later received our delegation and allowed us to place the various resolu-
tions in their hands, but
we
inevitably encountered
press.
much
bitter criticism
from the Allied
Only
slowly did public opinion reach a point of view similar to ours Keynes' epoch-making book was
:
his position ratified that
not published until a year later, but so widely was on the second celebration
of Armistice day in Kingsbury House in London at a meeting of ex-soldiers and sailors, one of the latter
lows
sorely wounded, spoke as fol"For every man who a year ago knew and said that the Peace Treaty was immoral in con:
who had been
164

who
WAR
ception and
sands
would be disastrous, there are thousay it now." There was much discussion at the Zurich Con-
League of Nations; the first commitand minority report, another committee reconciled them and resolutions were finally passed but the Zurich Congress took no definite position for or against the League of Nagress on the
tee
made
a majority
tions.
As
was open
to
the formal organization of the League change by the Peace Conference still
sitting, a number of careful suggestions were formulated and sent to Paris by a special committee
from the Congress. Two of the English members discussed them with Lord Robert Cecil, I saw Colonel House several times, our committee through the efforts of an Italian member was received by Signor Orlando and we also had a hearing at the Quai d'Orsay with the French minister of foreign affairs, and with the delegates from
other countries.
In Paris at that time the representatives of the smaller nations were already ex-
pressing their disappointment in the League but its proponents were elated over its adoption and
hopeful for the future. They all received our resolutions politely and sometimes discussed them at length, but only a few of the journalists and "experts" were enthusiastic about them. Throughout the meetings of the Zurich Congress the delegates, secure in their sense of
good
IN
will
165
and mutual understanding, spoke freely not
only of their experiences during the trial of war, but also of the methods which they were advocating for the
period of social and industrial Some of our re-adjustment following the war.
difficult
delegates represented nations in which revolutions with and without bloodshed had already taken The members of our organization had place. stood against the use of armed force in such do-
mestic crises as definitely as they had protested against its use in international affairs. The pacifists
had already played
this role in the revolu-
Hungary. Having come together under the shadow of the great war itself, we had an opportunity to hear
so soon
early of the courageous and intelligent action taken by our own groups in the widespread war after
tions in Bavaria, in Austria, in
the war.
The Congress ending with

the town
fifteen
officials,
a banquet given by
different
countries,
was attended by delegates from many of whom had

difficulties.
come under great
ferences as to terms
in the
Despite sharp difTreaty, the meetings
were absolutely harmonious and many delegates

confessed to each other that they felt as if they were passing through a rare spiritual experience.
In addition to a long
tional affairs, a
list
of resolutions on interna-
woman's charter and an education were drawn The name of the orprogram up.
66
WAR
ganization was changed to iiWonjaji^s Interna7 tional League for Peace and FreedonV ~and Ueneva, as the seat of Tlie~League uf Nations, was made the headquarters. Emily Balch, from the United States, a professor of economics in Wellesley College
in
became
secretary, agreeing to remain
Europe for the following two
years.
our return to Paris there were many symptoms of the malaise and confusion for which the peace terms were held responsible although it would be difficult to say how much of it was the inevitable aftermath of war. In the midst of it all only the feeding of the hungry seemed to offer the tonic of beneficent activity. During our stop at Paris in May we had talked with Dr. Nansen, who was keen on the prospect of entering Russia for the sake of feeding the women and children, but upon our return we found that the Nansen plan had been indefinitely postponed in spite of the popular reports that thousands of people in the aftermath of war were starving in the industrial centers of Russia. Mr. Hoover's office seemed to be the one reasonable spot in the midst
of the widespread confusion; the great maps upon the wall recorded the available food resources and
indicated fleets 'of ships carrying wheajt from Australia to Finland or corn from the port of New
On
York
to Fiume. And yet even at that moment the food blockade, hitherto regarded as a war meas-
IN
ure,
sia

was being applied both
as to
167
Hungary and Rus-
pressure against their political arrange-
ments, foreboding sinister possibilities.

rich Congress
The Zu-
protest against this unfair use of the newly formulated knowledge of the world's food supply and of a centralized methfirst
had made a
od for
in
its
distribution.
There was
a soviet regime
Hungary during our meeting in Zurich. Of our two delegates from Hungary, one was in sympathy with it and one was not, but they both felt
hotly against the blockade which had been instituted against Hungary as an attempt to settle the question of the form of government through the starvation of the people. On our return to Paris after the Zurich Congress,
Dr. Hamilton and I accepted an invitation from the American Friends' Service Committee
go into Germany. In explanation of our journey it may be well to quote from a "minute" passed at a meeting held in Devonshire House, London, the central office of the Society of "We are thankful to Friends, July 4th, 1919:
to
learn that certain
members of the Religious Soare of Friends now proceeding to Germany ciety under a deep sense of the need which exists for
mutual friendly intercourse and fellowship between those who all belong to the same great human family and who have been separated during these sad years of war.
168
WAR
.
"Our
friends are traveling on behalf of the
Committee which has under its care the arrangements for sending 'Gifts of Love' to Germany, in the form of food, clothes and other necessaries,
a work that is shared in by many other persons not associated with Friends in membership." The four English members of the Committee
traveled through the occupied region, entered Germany via Cologne, and reached Berlin July 6th; the three American members who traveled through
Holland and crossed the border on the

ilian
first civ-
passports issued there since the signing of Dr. Aletta peace, arrived in Berlin July 7th.
Jacobs, who had been asked as a neutral to make observations on health conditions in Germany, was
the fourth
member of
the second party.
Dr.
Elizabeth Rotten, of Berlin,
who had been acting as the representative in Germany of the work of the English Friends and was also head of the
Educational Committee of the Germany Association for the Promotion of the League of Na-
was naturally our guide and advisor. were received everywhere in a fine spirit of courtesy. Doctors, nurses and city officials, who were working against tuberculosis, to keep children healthy, to prevent youthful crime and foster education, had long passed the mood of bitterness. What they were facing was the shipwreck of a nation and they had no time for resenttions,
We
IN EUROPE DURING
ments.
THE ARMISTICE
if
169
They
realized that
help did not come
quickly and abundantly, the coming generation in Germany was largely doomed to early death or,
at best, to a handicapped
life.
had, of course, seen something of the widespread European starvation before we went into Germany our first view in Europe of starved children was in the city of Lille in Northern France,
;
We
where the school children were being examined for tuberculosis. We had already been told that
forty per cent of the children of school age in Lille had open tuberculosis and that the remaining
sixty per cent
were practically
all suspects.
As we
entered the door of a large school room, we saw at the other end of the room a row of little boys,
from six to ten years of age, passing slowly in front of the examining physician. The children were stripped to the waist and our first impression
was of
all
a line of
moving skeletons;
their little
shoulder blades stuck straight out, the vertebrae
were
their
perfectly distinct as were their ribs, and
bony arms hung limply at their sides. To add to the gruesome effect not a sound was to be heard, for the French physician had lost his voice as a result of shell shock during the first bombardment of Lille. He therefore whispered his instructions to the children as he applied his stethoscope and the children, thinking it was some sort
of game,
all
whispered back to him.
It
was
in-
I7o
WAR
credibly pathetic and unreal and we could but accept the doctor's grave statement that only by
a system of careful superfeeding, could any of had also these boys grow into normal men. seen starved children in Switzerland six hundred
We
:
Viennese children arriving

in private
Zurich to be guests they stood upon the station platforms without any of the bustle and chatter naturally associated with a large number
in
households.
As
of children, we had again that painful impression of listlessness as of a mortal illness; we saw the
winged shoulder blades standing out through their meagre clothing, the little thin legs which scarcely supported the emaciated bodies. The committee of Swiss women was offering them cakes and chocolates, telling them of the children at home who were waiting for them, but there was little response because there was no vitality with which to
make
week
it.
We were reminded of these

as
children
week
after
we
visited Berlin, or
Frankfort
am Main,
of Saxony and the villages throughout the Erzgebirge in which the children had been
or the
cities
starved throughout the long period of the war and of the armistice. Perhaps an experience in
Leipzig was typical when we visited a public playground in which several hundred children were
having a noonday meal consisting for each of a pint of "war soup," composed of war meal stirred
IN EUROPE
171
into a pint of hot water. The war meal was, as always, made with a foundation of rye or wheat flour to which had been added ground vegetables
or sawdust in order to increase
its
bulk.
The
chil-
dren would have nothing more to eat until supper, for which many of the mothers had saved the entire daily ration of bread because, as they sometimes told us, they hoped thus to avert the hard-
had to bear; hearing the children and moan for hours after they were put whimper to bed because they were too hungry to go to
est thing they
sleep.
as all the others
These Leipzig children were quite as listless we had seen when the playground director announced prizes for the best gardens, they were utterly indifferent; only when he said he hoped by day after tomorrow to give them milk in their soup did they break out into the most
;
ridiculous,
feeble little cheer ever heard.
The
challenged the director as to his playground ability to obtain the to the director which milk, replied that he was not
city physician,
us,
who was
with
sure that he could, but that there was a prospect for it, and that the children must have something
to
hope
for, that that
young.
visit
With
this uncertain
was the prerogative of the hope we left them to
day nurseries, child welfare stations, schools and orphanages where the midday meal was pracWe were told by tically the same war soup.
172

officers
WAR
and charity workers of starved children who stole the family furniture and clothing, books and kitchen utensils in order to sell them for food, who pulled unripe potatoes and turnips from the fields for miles surrounding the
probation
cities,
Our
to keep themselves alive. experiences in the midst of widespread
from those of thousands of other Americans who were bent upon succor and relief and our vivid and compelling impressions of widespread starvation were confirmed by the highMr. Hoover had recently deest authorities.
misery, did not differ
clared that, owing to diminished food production
in Europe, approximately 100,000,000 Europeans were then dependent upon imported food. Sir George Paish, the British economist, repeated the
in
statement when he said that 100,000,000 persons Europe were facing starvation. All this was
in
made much worse by the rapid decline value of European money in the markets
world.
the
of the
One turned
instinctively to the
newly created
this
League of Nations.
Could
it
have considered
multitude of starving children as its concrete problem, feeding them might have been the quickest way to restore the divided European nations to
human and kindly relationship. Was all this devastation the result of hypernationalism and might
not the very recognition of a
human
obligation
IN
173
irrespective of national boundaries form the natural beginning of better international relation-
ships?
My entire
marked
experience in Europe in 1915 was in contrast to my impressions received thirty-
four years earlier, Nationalism was also inij^Si^ the great word then, but with quite another content. At that moment in all political matters the
word had been Unity; a coming tonew national systems of little states which had long been separated. The words of Mazzini, who had died scarcely a decade before,
great popular
gether into
were constantly on the
lips
of ardent young ora-
tors, the desire to unite, to overcome differences, to accentuate likenesses, was everywhere a ruling
influence in political affairs.
Italy
had become
united under Victor Emanuel; the first Kaiser and Bismarck ruled over a German Empire made of
many minor
states.
It rather
ing, in those days, to use the
smacked of learnwords Slavophile and
Panslavic, but we knew that the movement stood for unity in the remoter parts of Europe where Bohemia was the most vocal, although she talked
less
of a republic of her own than of her desire to unite with her fellow Slavs. The,j3]U]iststrik-
ing characteristic of all these nationalistic movements h^d hf pn thr\r burning hiinunlt^ianisnr, a sense that the new groupings were but a preparation for a wider synthesis, that a federation of at
174

European
states
WAR
least the
was
a possibility in the
near future. In 1885 I had seen nationalistic fervor pulling scattered people together, but in 1919 it seemed equally effective in pushing those apart who had a whole ring of states was once been combined Mother out of Russia, Bavaria was threatpulling to leave Germany, and Italy, in the name ening
its
of nationalism was separating a line of coast with hinterland of Slavs, from their newly found
brethren.
lier
Whereas nationalism thirty years earhad seemed generous and inclusive, stressing
likenesses, it
less, insisting
now appeared dogmatic and

upon
will.
ruth-
historic prerogatives quite in-
dependent of the popular

istic fervor
itself,
Had
the national-
become overgrown and over-reached

it
or was
merely for the moment so
self-
assertive that the creative impulse was submerged into the possessive instinct ? Had nationalism be-
come dogmatic and hardened in thirty-five years? It was as if I had left a group of early Christians and come back into a flourishing mediaeval church
holding great possessions and equipped with well The early spontried methods of propaganda. had into an authoritative taneity changed imposition of power. where in that
One received the impression everymoment when nationalism was
tremendously stressed, that the nation was demanding worship and devotion for its own sake
so
IN EUROPE
similar
it

as
its
175
if
to
that of the mediaeval church,
existed for
own ends
of growth and power

It
irrespective of the tests of reality.
demanded
all
unqualified obedience, denounced as heretics
who
differed, insisted that it alone

all
had
the truth,
and exhibited
the well
known
signs of dogma-
tism, including a habit of considering ordinary standards inapplicable to a certain line of conduct
were inspired by motives beyond reproach. saw arriving in Rotterdam, from the German colonies in Africa and the Pacific, hundreds of German families who had been driven from their pioneer homes and their colonial business underif it
We
takings, primarily because they belonged to the outlaw nation; in many of the railroad stations in
Germany
fugitives
there were posted directions for the
coming from Posen, from Alsace, from
the
new Czecho-Slovakia and from the Danzig corridor. As we had opportunity to learn of their
experiences, they told of prohibition of language, of the forced sale of real estate, of the confiscation
of business, of the expulsion from university faculties and the alienation of old friends. There
was something about

chronistic like
it all that was curiously anathe expulsion of the Jews from Spain, or Cromwell's drive through Ireland when the Catholics took refuge in the barren west coun-
try,
herself poorer for generations
or of the action by which France had made when she banished
176

It is as if nationalism,
WAR
had
her Huguenots.
fallen
through
the terms of the Peace
Conference
itself,
back into an earlier psychology, exhibiting a blind intolerance which does not properly belong to these later centuries. After all, the new Nationalism even counting its rise as beginning three hundred years ago is still in its early history. It might be possible for its representatives to meet in frank and fearless discussion of its creeds as the early church in its first centuries called its Ecumenical Councils.
These creeds would easily divide into types: the hypernationalism, if one may call it such, of the suppressed nations, as Ireland, Poland or Bohemia; the imperialistic nationalism of empires Great Britain in which colonial expansion had become the normal expression and is no longer
like
challenged as a policy; the revolutionary type, such as Russia attempting an economic state. Every nation would show traces of all types of
nationalism, and
ideals.
it would be found that all types have displayed the highest devotion to their
It
is
possible that such a hypothetical Council
would discover that as the greatest religious war came at the very moment when men were deciding that they no longer cared intensely for the theological creeds for which they had long been fighting, so this devastating war may have come
IN

moment
in
177
at a similar
regard to national dogmas.
The
the
world, at the very verge of the creation of
when
League of Nations may be entering an era the differing types will no longer suppress each other but live together in a fuller and richer comity than has ever before been possible. But the League of Nations must find a universal
motive which shall master the overstimulated
nationalism so characteristic of Europe after the war.
We
came home
in the
late in
August, inevitably
dis-
appointed newly formed League, but eager to see what would happen when "the United States came in I"
CHAPTER IX
A
FEW months
after our return
from Europe
the annual meeting of the
Woman's Peace Party
was held
the
in Philadelphia,
Meeting House.
The
again at the Friends' reports showed that during
war
the state branches
had modified
relief of
their ac-
tivities in various ways. branch had carried on war
The Massachusetts many kinds,
such as the operation of a plant for desiccating vegetables. The New York Branch on the other
hand, had become more radical and

its
in
defense of
position published a monthly Journal entitled
The Four Winds, which was
constantly chal-
lenged by the Federal authorities. The annual meeting adopted the somewhat formidable name of Woman's International League for Peace and Freedom, Section for the United States, the Zurich resolutions
were accepted for substance of
study. a careful restatement of our policies, but the bald outline gave no more than a hint of
doctrine and
recommended for
We made
the
indomitable faith of the

178
women
gathered
there who, after nearly five years of anxiety and
THE AFTERMATH OF WAR
179
of hope deferred, still solemnly agreed to renew the struggle against the war system and to work
for a wider comity of nations. Two of the new officers, Mrs. Lucy Biddle Lewis and Mrs. Wm. I. Hull, belonged to the Society of Friends, without whose help it would
have been hard to survive.
It is difficult for
me
adequately to express my admiration for Mrs. Anna Garlin Spencer who was president of the National League during the most difficult period
of
its
existence.
With
the help of
two able execuan organ-
tive secretaries, she deliberately revived
ization devoted to the discredited cause of Peace

at a moment when the established peace societies with which she had been long connected had carefully stripped themselves of all activity.
In some respects it was more time to be known as a pacifist than
difficult at
it
that
had been dur-
ing the war, and if any of us had ever imagined that our troubles would be over when the war
we were doomed were many illustrations

ended,
to disappointment.
There
of our continued unpopu-
In the early days of the armistice, for larity. instance, a group of German women, distressed
over such terms as the demand for the immediate restoration of 3000 milch cows to Belgium, cabled
to
me.
at the White House and also to was never delivered and I knew My nothing but what the newspapers reported con-
Mrs. Wilson
cable
180
WAR
cerning it, although the incident started an interminable chain of comment and speculation as to
should have been selected, none of which stumbled upon the simple truth that I had presided
why
over a Congress at The Hague attended by two of the signatories of the cable.
however, was but a foretaste of the suspicions and misinterpretations resulting from the efforts of Miss Hamilton and myself to report conditions in Germany and so far as possible to secure contributions to the fund the Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia was collecting for German and Austrian children. There was no special odium attached to the final report which we made to the Friends upon our return nor upon its wide distribution in printed
incident,
The
form;
it
was
also comparatively easy to speak to
the International Committee for the Promotion
of Friendship between the Churches and to similar bodies, but when it came to addressing audiences
of
German descent, so-called "German-Americans," the trouble began. The first Chicago meet-
ing of this kind was carefully arranged, "opened with prayer" by a popular clergyman and closed by a Catholic priest, and it went through without
difficulty
although, of course, no
word of
in
it
ap-
peared Engany Chicago newspaper printed lish. Milwaukee, St. Louis and Cleveland, however, were more difficult, although my theme was
in
181
I purely humanitarian with no word of politics. told no audience that our passports had been viseed in Frankfort in the city hall flying a red
flag, that housing space was carefully proportioned with reference to the need of the inhabi-
tants
and other such matters, which would have shocked the audience of prosperous Germanalways
others
quite as much as any one else. told these audiences as we told
Americans
We
many
who
invited us,
about the work of the
Friends' Service Committee in Northern France
and over widespread portions of Central and Eastern Europe irrespective of national boundaries.
phia for
Some money was always sent to Germany but quite often it was
Philadel-
marked for one of

the Friends' Service
I
carefully the Allied countries in which
Committee was also at work. was equally grateful for those contributions but often longed to hear some one suggest that
"to feed thine
enemy
if
he hunger" might lead
us back to normal relations with him, or to hear
one of the many clergymen pray that we might No such sentiment was forgive our enemies.
uttered
hearing during that winter, although in the early Spring I was much cheered
in
my
at
a meeting in
Denver when
:
club
woman
quoted apropos of feeding German children, from "I sow corn in the Bojer's "The Great Hunger"
82

of mine
WAR
exist-
field
enemy
in
order to prove the
ence of God."
a period or pronounced reaction, characterized by all sorts of espionage, of wholesale
It
was
Liberals everyraids, arrests and deportations. where soon realized that a contest was on all over the world for the preservation of that hard won liberty which since the days of Edmund Burke had come to mean to the civilized world not only security in life and property but in opinion as well. Many people had long supposed liberalism to be freedom to know and to say, not what was popular or convenient or even what was patriotic, but what they held to be true. But those very liberals came to realize that a distinct aftermath of the war was the dominance of the mass over
the individual to such an extent that
it
constituted
a veritable revolution in our social relationships. Every part of the country had its own manifestations of suspicion
and distrust which to
a surpris-
ing degree fastened upon the immigrants. These felt, some of them with good reason, that they
were being looked upon with suspicion and regarded as different from the rest of the world; that whatever happened in this country that was hard to understand was put off upon them, as if they alone were responsible. In such a situation they naturally became puzzled and irritated. With all the rest of the world America fell back
183
into the old habit of judging men, not by their individual merits or capacities, but by the cate-
gories of race and religion, thrusting them back into the part of the world in which they had been born. Many of the immigrants, Poles, Bohemians
their
and Croatians, were eager to be called by new names. They were keenly alive to the
Poland, in Czecho-Slovakia, in Jugo-Slavia and in other parts of Eastern and Southern Europe. They knew, of course, of the
redistributions in land, of the recognition of peasant proprietorship occurring not only in the vari-
fresh start
made
in
ous countries in which actual revolutions had taken

place as in Hungary and Russia, but in other countries such as Roumania, where there had been no
violent revolution.
eager to
know what
These immigrants were very share they themselves might

if
have
in these
They new state which might guarantee
they returned. longed to participate in the founding of a
great happenings
the liberties in
search of which they themselves had come to America. They were also anxious about unto-
ward
experiences which might have befallen their kinsfolk in those remote countries. For five years many of them had heard nothing directly from
their families
and their hearts were wrung over the possible starvation of their parents and sometimes of their wives and children. Had we as citizens of the United States made a
184
WAR
widespread and generous response to this overwhelming anxiety, much needed results might have
accrued to ourselves; our sympathy and aid given to their kinsmen in the old world might have
served to strengthen the bonds between us and the foreigners living within our borders. There
was a chance ous use and

proach.
sians
to restore the to end

its
word
service as a
alien to a righteterm of re-
To ignore
fail to
the natural anxiety of the Rus-
and to
understand their inevitable
re-
sentment against an unauthorized blockade, to account for their "restlessness" by all sorts of
fantastic explanations was to ignore a human situation which was full of possibilities for a fuller
fellowship and understanding. It was stated in the Senate that one and a half
million European immigrants had applied in the winter of '19 and '20 for return passports. In one small Western city in which 800 Russians were
275 went to the Western Coast hoping for an opportunity to embark for Siberia and thus to reach Russia. Most of them were denied passports and the enforced retention of so many peoliving,
ple constantly social unrest.
for what came to be called would sometimes hear a Russian say, "When I was in the old country I used to dream constantly of America, and of the time I might come here, but now I go about with the same longing in my heart for Russia, and am
made
We

homesick to go back to her."
those
185
In Chicago
many of
who
tried in
vain to return, began to pre-
pare themselves in all sorts of ways for usefulness in the new Russian state. Because Russia needed
skilled
in
in
mechanics they themselves founded schools applied mathematics, in mechanical drawing,
pattern work, in automobiling. was one of these latter schools in Chicago, where they were so cautious that they did not
It
teach any sort of history or economics, which was raided in the early part of January, 1920. general raid under the direction of the federal
Department of Justice "ran in" numbers of Chicago suspects on the second of January, but an enterprising states attorney in Chicago, doubtless craving the political prestige to be thus gained,
anticipated the federal action by twenty-four hours and conducted raids on his own account. The im-
migrants arrested without warrant were thrust into crowded police stations and all other avail-
was carried
able places of detention. The automobile school off bodily, the teachers, the sixty-four the books and papers the latter were conpupils,
;
sidered valuable because the algebraic formulas
appeared so incriminating. One Russian among those arrested on January

1920, I had known for many years as a member of a Tolstoy society, which I had attended
ist,
few times after
my visit
to Russia in 1896.
The
society
was composed of Russians committed
to
the theory of non-resistance and anxious to advance the philosophy underlying Tolstoy's books. I knew of no group in Chicago whose members I should have considered less dangerous. This man, with twenty-three other prisoners, was thrust into a cell built for eight men. There was no
room
to
sit,
even upon the

in
floor,
they could only
stand closely together, take turns in lying on the
benches and
standing by the door where they
might
by stretching their hands to the Because they were federal prisoners the police refused to feed them, but by the second day coffee and sandwiches were brought to them by federal officials. But the half-starved Tolstoyan even then would not eat meat nor drink coffee, but waited patiently until his wife found him and
exercise
top bars.
could feed him cereals and milk.
As
young man
he had edited the periodical of a humanitarian society in Russia and it was as a convinced humaniBecause tarian that he began to study Tolstoy.
the grand jury held him for trial under a state charge he could not even be deported if the fedIt was impossible, eral charge were sustained.
of course, not to "stand by" old friends such as he and others whom I had known for years, but
the experience of securing bail for them; of presiding at a meeting of protest against such violation of constitutional rights; of identification with

the vigorous Civil Liberties Union in and its Chicago branch, did not add to
ability in the eyes of
187
New York
my respect-
my
fellow citizens.
And yet the earlier Settlements had believed that the opportunity to live close to the people would enable the residents to know intimately
how
simple people felt upon fundamental issues and we had hoped that the residents would stand
fast to that
crisis
knowledge in the midst of a social where an interpreter would be valuable.
Could not such activity be designated as "settlement work?" It was certainly so regarded by a handful of settlement people in Boston and New York as well as Chicago. There were two contending trends of public opinion at this time which reminded me of the early Settlement days in the United States, one the working man's universal desire for public discussion and the other the employer's belief that such discussion per se
was
dangerous. In the midst of the world-wide social confusion
and distress, there inevitably developed a profound scepticism as to the value of established n
stitutions.
lenge, for
The situation in itself afforded a chalmen longed to turn from the animosii
ties of war and from the futility of the peace terms to unifying principles, and yet at that very moment any attempt at bold and penetrating dis-
cussion
was quickly and
ruthlessly suppressed as
if'
88
WAR
men had no
right to consider together the social conditions surrounding them. This dread and fear of discussion somewhat ac-
counted for the public sentiment exhibited toward the hundred members of the I. W. W. who were tried in Chicago for sedition. They were held
Cook County jail for many months awaitOur jail conditions, which are always ing trial. bad, were made worse through the inevitable overcrowding resulting from the addition of so many federal prisoners. One of the men died, one bein the
came
into a
temperamental Irishman, fell profound melancholy after he had been obliged to listen throughout the night to the erection of a gallows in the corridor upon which his cell opened where a murderer was "to meet the penalty of the law at dawn." Before the drop fell the prisoners were removed from their cells, but too late to save the mind of one of them. Eleven of the other prisoners contracted tuberculosis and
although the federal judge
insane, one, a
who was
hearing the
case lowered the bail and released others on their u own recognizance" in order to lessen the fearful
risks, the prisoners
were then faced with the neces-
sity for earning enough money for lodging and breakfast, before the long day in court began. Fortunately the judge allowed them a dinner and a
supper at the expense of the government. Some of us started a "milk fund" for those who were

plainly far
189
on the road to tuberculosis and per-
haps nothing revealed the state of the public mind more clearly than the fact that while we did collect a fund the people who gave it were in a
constant state of panic lest their names become known in connection with this primitive form of
W.'s were not on the whole used to regret sometimes that "pacifists" our group should be the one fated to perform this purely humanitarian function which would certainly become associated with sedition in the public mind. We should however logically have escaped
charity.
I.
The
W.
and
the representatives of "patriotic" societies working in the prison camps of the most backward countries at
all criticism
for at that very
moment
war, were allowed to separate the tubercular prisoners from their fellows.
The Berger trial came in January of the wretched winter. I had met Victor Berger first when as a young man he had spoken before a society at Hull-House which was being addressed by Benjamin Kidd, the English author of the then very popular book on "Social Evolution." I had seen
Mr. Berger occasionally during the period when he was in Washington as a Congressman, and knew that many of the Socialists regarded him as
slow because he insisted upon proceeding from one legislative measure to another and had no use for
"direct action."
And
yet here he
was
indicted
190
WAR
I
with three Chicago men, one a clergyman
whom
had known for years, for "conspiring to overthrow the government of the United States." Later there was the sudden rise of "agents provocateurs" in industrial strikes, and the strikers
believed that they were employed at Gary, by the secret service department of the government itself.
stories that were constantly current recalled bewilderment my years ago when the Russian exile Azeff died in Paris. He was considered by one faction as an agent provocateur, by another as a devoted revolutionist. The events of his remarkable life, which were undisputed, might easily
The
support either theory, quite as
in a
famous Eng-
lish trial for sedition a prisoner,
named Watts,
had been so used by both

was hard
court itself could not determine his status.
sides that the English It
to believe the story that a Russian well
known
as of the
Czar's police, had organized
Gary for "direct action," had them freely both with radical literature supplied and with firearms but that fortunately just before the headquarters were raided the strike leaders
twenty-four
in
men
discovered "the plot," persuaded the Russians that they were being duped by the simple statement
that any one who gave them arms in a district under military control, was deliberately putting them
in
danger of their fives. So it was perhaps not surprising that the Rus-

sians
191
became angry and confused and were quite sure that they were being incited and betrayed by
government agents. The Russians were even suspicious of help from philanthropists because a man who had been head of the Russian bureau in the Department of Public Information and who had stood by the discredited Sisson letters, had after
the discontinuance of the
Department been
trans-
ferred to the Russian Section of the American
Red
was suspected that the Settlements even, although they were furnishing bail, might be in
Cross
;
it
Red Cross Society. a certain historic got perspective, if not comfort at least enlargement of view, by being able
collusion with the
I
to
compare our widespread panic
in the
United
States about Russia to that which prevailed in England during and after the French Revolution.
A flood of reactionary pamphlets,

issued by our Security Leagues,
similar to those
had then
filled
England, teaching contempt of France and her "Liberty," urging confidence in English society as it existed and above all warning of the dangers of any change. Hatred of France, a passionate
contentment with things as they were, and a dread of the lower classes, became characteristic of English society. The French Revolution was continually
inevitable
used as a warning, for in it could be seen the and terrible end of the first steps to-
ward democracy.
Even when
the panic subsided
192
WAR
the temper of society remained unchanged for years, so that in the English horror of any kind of revolution, the struggle of the hand-loom
weaver in an agony of adjustment to the changes of machine industry, appeared as a menace against
an innocent community.
Was
classes,
this attitude of the
since dead, being repeated in
English gentry long our so-called upper
and
ilies
especially among people in professional financial circles ? them and their fam-
Among
a
war work opened
socialized in
new type of activity, more form than many of them had ever
known
before, and it also gave an outlet to their In the minds of many good higher emotions. men and women the war itself thus became associ-
ated with all that was high and fine and patriotism received the sanction of a dogmatic religion which would brook no heretical difference of opinion.
Added
were the millions of peothe ple throughout country who were actually in the clutches of those unknown and subhuman
to this, of course,
may easily destroy the life of manscholar has said of them, "morally it would seem that these forces are not better but
forces which
kind.
less
good than mankind, for man at least loves and Such forces may pities and tries to understand."
have been responsible for the mob violence which broke out for a time against alien enemies and so-called "traitors," or it may have been merely
193
the unreason, the superstition, the folly and inThere was justice of the old "law of the herd."
possibly still another factor in the situation in regard to Russia, the acid test, a touch of the peculiar bitterness evolved during a strike where
That typical property interests are assailed. American, William Allen White, once wrote, "My idea of hell, is a place where every man owns a little property and thinks he is just about to lose
it."
Was the challenge which Russia threw down to the present economic system after all the factor most responsible for the unreasoning panic which
its grip, or was it that been spirit, having painstakingly evolved united of the civilized world, could not press by the easily be exorcised? The way had made obvious
seemed
the
to hold the nation in
war
the sheer inability of the world to prevent terroi and misery. It had been a great revelation oJ
as if weakness, ignorance and over-| weening nationalism had combined to produce' something much more cruel than any calculated Was the universal cruelty could have been. happiness which seemed to envelop the United States as well as Europe an inevitable aftermath
feebleness,
of
war?
So far as we had anticipated any contribution
non-resistant
from the
Russian peasant to the
cause of Universal Peace, the events in militarized
194
WAR
Russia during the years after the war threw us into black despair. Not only had the Bolshevist lead-
produced one of the largest armies in Europe, but disquieting rumors came out of Russia that in order to increase production in their time of need the government had been conscripting men It was both for industry and transportation. quite possible that the Russian revolutionists were making the same mistake in thus forging a new tool for their own use which earlier revolutioners
ists
had made when they invented
universal mili-
tary conscription. example of the failure of to cast out the devil by Beezlebub, it had trying been used as a temporary expedient when the
first
An
French
revolutionists
were
fighting
"the
world," but had gradually become an established thing, and in the end was the chief implement of
It alone has thrown Europe back trereaction. mendously, entailing an ever-increasing cost of military establishment and consequent increased withdrawal of manpower from the processes of
normal
living.
The proportion
of soldiers
since the
in
Europe has enormously increased
middle
ages; then out of every thousand men four were soldiers, now out of every thousand men a hundred
figures before the great war. Even the League of Nations, during the first year of its existence brought little comfort. Inci-
and twenty to These were the
hundred and
fifty
are soldiers.
195
dent to the irritating and highly individualistic position which the pacifist was forced to assume
throughout the war, was the difficulty of combining with his old friends and colleagues in efforts for world organization which seemed so reasonable. Before I went to The Hague in the spring
of 1915 I had known something of Mr. Hamilton Holt's plan to organize a league whose propaganda should relegate the use of military force
to an international police service. It was while we were at The Hague that the great meeting was held in Independence Hall in Philadelphia and the
League to Enforce Peace was organized. The program did not attempt to outlaw war but would
allow
it
only under certain carefully defined conIt
ditions.
was
difficult to resist
an invitation to
join the new league, and I refused only because its liberal concessions as to the use of warfare seemed to
me
to
add
I
to the dislocation of the times, al-
ready so out of joint.
Had
yielded to
my
join-
should certainly have been obliged ing impulse later. to resign The League to Enforce Peace
New York City soon after the United States had entered the war and put forth a program hard to reconcile even with its first statement of principles. But after the armistice had been signed, at a meeting held in Madison, Wisheld a meeting in
consin, in the winter of 1919, their clear statement of a League of Nations program brought to their
I96

many
of
the
doubtful,
WAR
among
banner them.
myself
The
later winter
and spring of 1919 afforded
a wonderful opportunity to talk about the League of Nations. It was all in the making and we, its
advocates,
had the world before us with which
to
hopes of mankind." Among my audiences in the half dozen states in which I lectured there would often be a Pole who rejoiced that after a hundred and fifty years of oppression Poland would be free; an Italian longing impatiently to welcome back Italia Irredenta; a Bohemian exulting that the long struggle of his fellow-countrymen had at last reached success; an Armenian who saw the end of Turkish rule. Conillustrate "the
scious at
moments
that
all this
portended perhaps
too
nationalism, I could only assure myself and an audience absorbed in animated discussion,
much
that such a state of
mind was
inevitable after war,
and would doubtless
being developed I had a sharp reminder in the midst of this hal-
find its place in the plans in Paris.
cyon period of hope and expectation that a pacifist could not acceptably talk even of the terms of
peace to those who most ardently promoted the war. I had accepted an invitation from a program committee to address one of the long estab-
woman's organizations of Chicago upon the League of Nations, only to find that there was a
lished
197
sharp division within the membership as to the propriety of allowing a pacifist to appear before them. The president and the board valiantly stood by the invitation and the address was
finally
given on the date announced to the half of the club
and their friends who were willing to hear. But the incident gave me a curious throw-back into a state of mind I was fast leaving behind me, and
in
although fortunately a day or two later I spoke Chicago under the direct auspices of the League
to Enforce Peace with ex-President

ing,
which
Taft presidafterward learned somewhat restored
me among
the doubting, I concluded that to the
very end pacifists will occasionally realize that they have been permanently crippled in their natural and friendly relations to their fellow
citizens.
of Nations afforded an opportunity for wide difference of opinion in every group. The Woman's Peace Party held its annual meeting in Chicago in the spring of 1920 and found our Branches fairly divided upon the subject. The
The League
Boston branch had followed the leadership of the League to Enforce Peace throughout the year and after the Madison meeting others had also,
always with the notable exception of the Philadelphia branch, composed largely of clear-sighted Quakers and of two other branches which were
more
radical.
The
difference
of opinion was
98
WAR
limited always as to the existing League and never for a moment did anyone doubt the need for con-
tinued effort to bring about an adequate international organization. Some of our members cooperated with the League of Free Nations Association (now the Foreign Policies Association) which had been organized by liberals in order to keep the democratic war aims before the public. Even when peacemaking was going forward at
Versailles the association pointed out vulnerable points in the draft at cost of being roundly de-
nounced.
We
new
all
believed that the ardor and self sacrifice
so characteristic of youth could be enlisted for the vitally energetic role required to inaugurate a
type of international life in the world. realized that it is only the ardent spirits, the lovers
We
of mankind, who can break down the suspicion and lack of understanding which have so long prevented the changes upon which international good
order depend.
lieved,
These men of good
will
we
be-
would
at last create a political organization
enabling nations to secure without war those high ends which they had vainly although so gallantly sought to obtain upon the battlefield.
CHAPTER X
A FOOD CHALLENGE TO THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
DURING the first year of

there were times
the
League of Nations,
when we felt that the governments must develope a new set of motives and of habits, certainly a new personnel before they
would be
able to create a genuine
League; that
the governmental representatives were fumbling awkwardly at a new task for which their previous training in international relations unfitted them.
had
absolutely
In a book entitled "International Government"
put out by the Fabian Society, its author, Leonard Woolf, demonstrates the super-caution govern-
ments traditionally exhibit

great
in regard to all foreign under the pressure of even when relationships
human
needs.
The
illustrations I
remember
most
distinctly
were the "International Diplo-
matic Conferences" following epidemics of cholera in Europe between 1851 and 1892. Five times
these Conferences, convened in haste and dread,
adjourned without action, largely because

199
each,
nation was afraid to delegate any power to an-
200
WAR
The
other, lest national sovereignty be impaired.

last
European epidemic of cholera broke out in 1892. Even then national prestige and other ab-
stractions dear to the heart of the diplomat confined the quarantine regulations, signed by thirteen
states, to ships passing through the Suez Canal, the governments hoping thus to provide a barrier against disease at the point where the streams
of pilgrim
other.
traffic
and Asiatic trading crossed each

points out that
if
it
Mr. Woolf
the state
had any connection with the people,
was
cer-
tainly of vital interest that cholera should not be allowed to spread into Europe; but that these
genuine
human
interests
were
sacrificed to a so-
called foreign policy, to "a reputation for finesse and diplomatic adroitness, confined to a tiny circle
of government diplomats." In the meantime the pragmatic old world had gone on its way, and because there
sibility
was developing
new
sense of responinto
for public health, scientists and doctors
from many nations had become organized

International Associations.
so
In fact there were
of these, that a "Permanent International Commission of the International Congresses of
many
Medicine" was finally established. Such organizations were doing all sorts of things about cholera, while the governments under which they lived were afraid to act together because each so highly
prized
its
national sovereignty.
A FOOD CHALLENGE
Did something of
201
this spirit, still surviving, in-
evitably tend to inhibit action among the representatives of the nations first collected under the
League of Nations, and will the be able to depend upon nationalism ever League even multiplied by forty-eight or sixty? Must not
auspices of the
League evoke a human motive transcending and yet embracing all particularist nationalisms,
the
before
can function with validity? During the first year of the League the popular enthusiasm seemed turned into suspicion, the comit
mon man
distrusted the
indifferent to the
League because it was so widespread misery and starva-
tion of the world; because in point of fact it did not end war and was so slow to repair its ravages
its remote prisoners; because it so refused to become the tentative instrucautiously ment of the longed for new age. Certainly its
and to return
and early pronouncements were disappointing. During the first months of its existence the League of Nations, apparently ignoring the social conditions of Europe and lacking the incentives which arise from developing economic resources had fallen back upon the political concepts of the 1 8th century, more abstractly noble than our own perhaps, but frankly borrowed and therefore failing both in fidelity and endurance. It may be necessary, as has been said, to turn the State and its purposes into an idealistic abconstitution
202

men
it
it,
WAR
straction before
death for
the
but
was
are willing to fight to the all the more necessary after
war to come back as quickly as possible to normal motives, to the satisfaction of simple human needs. It was imperative that there
should be a restored balance in human relationships, an avoidance of all the dangers which an
overstrained idealism fosters.
This return should have been
all
the easier be-
cause during the world war, literally millions of people had stumbled into a situation where "those
great cloud banks of ancestral blindness weighing down upon human nature" seemed to have lifted
they became conscious of an unexpected sense of relief, as if they had returned to a state of primitive well-being. The old tribal
for a
sense of solidarity, of belonging to the whole, was enormously revived by the war when the strain of
moment and
of one nation but of
common danger brought the members, not only many nations, into a new
realization of solidarity and of a primitive interIn the various armies and later dependence.
populations, two of men's which had existed in age-long companionship became widely operative; the first might be called security from attack, the second Both of them originsecurity from starvation. ated in tribal habits and the two motives are still
among
the
civilian
earliest instincts
present in some form in
all
governments.
A FOOD CHALLENGE
Throughout the war the
ized to
its
203
first instinct
was
util-
fullest possibility
by every device of
propaganda when one nation after another was

mobilizing for a "purely defensive war." The second, which might be called security from
starvation became the foundation of the great organizations for feeding the armies and for con-
serving
and distributing food supplies
among
civilian populations.
The suggestion was inevitable that if the first could so dominate the world that ten million
young men were ready
spend their lives in its assertion, surely something might be done with the second, also on an international scale, to reto
civilization.
make destroyed
Throughout
a multitude of
their period of service in the army,
young men experienced a primitive relief and healing because they had lost that sense of separateness, which many of them must have
cordially detested,
the
consciousness that they

their fel-
were living
lows.
after
differently
from the mass of
As he came home, one returned soldier another trying to explain why he found it
settle
hard to
back into
his
pressed more or
less coherently that
previous life, exhe missed the
sense of comradeship, of belonging to a mass of men. Doubtless the moment of attack, of danger
shared
in
such wise that the
life
of each
man was
absolutely dependent
upon
his
comrade's courage
204
WAR
and steadfastness, were the moments of his highest consciousness of solidarity, but on the other hand he must have caught an expression of it at The soldier knew, that as a mere other times. incident to his great cause, he was being fed and billeted, and the sharing of such fare as the army
afforded in simple comradeship, doubtless also gave him a sense of absolute unity. Although the
did not talk very freely of their exone gradually confirmed what the newsperiences, and magazines were then reporting, that papers the returned soldiers were restless and unhappy. I remember one Sunday afternoon when Hull-
returned
men
House gave
Hull-House
a reception to the members of the Band, who with their leader had been
the nucleus of the I49th Field Artillery Band, serving in France and later in Coblenz, that the
young men, obviously glad
to be at
home, were yet
curiously ill-adjusted to the old conditions. They enthusiasm described the of mass action, haltingly the unquestioning comradeship of identical aims
which army experiences had brought them. Throughout the war something of the same enthusiasm had come to be developed in regard to
It also became unnatural for feeding the world. an individual to stand outside of the wide-spread effort to avert starvation.
He was overwhelmed
with a sense of mal-adjustment, of positive wrongdoing if he stressed at that moment the slowly ac-
A FOOD CHALLENGE
205
quired and substitute virtue of self support, and he even found it difficult to urge the familiar excuse of family obligation which had for so long a
time been considered adequate. This combination of sub-conscious memories
and a keen realization of present day needs, overcivilians when the grim necessity of feeding millions of soldiers and of relieving the bitter hunger of entire populations in remote
whelmed many
was constantly with them. The necesfor sity rationing stirred that comradeship which is expressed by a common table, and also healed a
countries,
galling consciousness on the part of many people that they were consuming too much while fellow
creatures were starving.
Did
soldiers
and
civilians alike roll off a
burden
of conscious difference endured from ancestral

days, even from simian groups which preceded the human tribes? In their earlier days men so lived
member of the tribe shared such food and safety as were possible to the whole. Does the sense of burden endured since imply that in the break-up of the tribe and of the patriarchal family,
that each
human nature has The happiness?
lost
something essential to
teachers
its
great religious
may
have attempted to restore it when they have preached the doctrine of sharing the life of the meanest and of renouncing all until the man at the bottom is fed.
206

at least,
WAR
two of the old tribal virtues were in the ascendancy and the fascination of exercising them was expressed equally by the Red Cross worker who felt as if she "had never really lived before" and actually dreaded to resume her pre-war existence, and the returned soldier who had discovered such a genuine comradeship that he pronounced the old college esprit de corps tame by contrast.
For the moment,
nature, in spite of its marvelous adapthas never quite fitted its back to the moral ability, strain involved in the knowledge that fellow In one generation this creatures are starving.
strain subsides to an uneasy sense of moral discomfort, in another it rises to a consciousness of
Human
moral
in
obliquity;
it
has lain at the basis of
many
and
religious communities
and
social experiments,
our own generation is finding extreme expression in governmental communism. In the face of the widespread famine, following the devastation of war, it was inevitable that those political and social institutions which prevented the adequate production and distribution of food should be
selves
sharply challenged. Hungry men asked themwhy such a situation should exist, when the
sufficient
world was capable of producing a
food
forgot not only that the world itself supply. had been profoundly modified by the war, but that
the minds which appraise
it
We
had
also been repolar-
A FOOD CHALLENGE
207
ized as they were forced to look at life from the point of view of primitive human needs.
groups of men all over the world therefore the time had apparently now come to make certain that all human creatures should be insured against death by starvation. They did not so much follow the religious command as a
different
To
primitive instinct to feed the hungry, although in a sense these economic experiments of our own
time are but the counterpart of the religious experiments of another age.
During the
in
first
months of
so-called peace
when
everywhere Europe the advantage shifted from the industrial town to the food-producing country,
it
seemed reasonable to believe that the
existing
in the
governments, from their war experiences
increased production and distribution of foods, might use the training of war to meet the great In underlying demand reasonably and quickly.
point of fact, during the

five
first
fell,
European
cabinets
year after the war, due largely to the
grinding poverty resulting from the prolonged war. Two of these governments fell avowedly
over the sudden

cost.
rise in the price
of bread which
had been subsidized and sold
at a fraction of its
The demand
knowledged
for food
was recognized and

measure
valid, but
it
ac-
as in a great
was
being met in piecemeal fashion while a
much
208
WAR
needed change in the world's affairs threatened to occur under the leadership of men driven desperate by hunger.
In point of fact, the demand could be met only adequately if the situation were treated on an international basisj the nations workligation.
ing together whole-heartedly to fulfill a world obIf from the very first the League of
Nations could have performed an act of faith which marked it at once as the instrument of a new era, if it had evinced the daring to meet new demands which could have been met in no other way, then, and then only would it have become the necessary instrumentality to carry on the enlarged life of the world and would have been recognized
two years after the war was in dire need of an overmastering motive forcing it to function and to
the
as indispensable. Certain it is that for
League of Nations
justify itself to an expectant world, even to endear itself to its own adherents. As the war had
how much stronger is the instinct of self-defense than any motives for a purely private good, so one dreamed that the period of
demonstrated
commercial depression following the war might make clear the necessity for an appeal to the much wider and profounder instinct responsible for conserving human life. In the first years after the cessation of the great war there was all over the world a sense of loss in
A FOOD CHALLENGE
209
motive power, the consciousness that there was no

driving force equal to that furnished by the heroism and self-sacrifice so lately demanded. The
great principles embodied in the League of Nations, rational and even appealing though they were, grew vague in men's minds because it was
difficult to make them objective. There seemed no motive for their immediate utilization. But what could have afforded a more primitive, genuine and abiding motive than feeding the peoples of the earth on an international scale, utilizing all the courage and self-sacrifice evolved by the war. All that international administration which performed such miracles of production in the prosecu-
tion of the
Party at
its
defined by the British Labor annual conference in 1919 as "a world-
war was
government actually
in
being which should be
made
the beginnings of a constructive international
society." The British
mended
Labor Party, therefore, recomthree concrete measures apart from the revision of the Peace Treaty, as follows:
A complete raising of the blockade 1. EVERYWHERE, in PRACTICE as well as IN NAME.

2.
Granting
CREDITS to
enemy and
to liber-
ated countries alike, to enable them to obtain food and raw materials sufficient to put them in a position where they can begin to help themselves.
aio
3.

Measures for the
WAR
special relief of children
EVERYWHERE,
without regard to the political
allegiance of their parents.
How simple and adequate these three recommendations were and yet how far-reaching in their They would first of all have comconsequences
!
pelled the promoters of the

1
League to drop the
8th century phrases in which diplomatic intercourse is conducted, and to substitute plain eco-
nomic terms fitted to the matter in hand. Such a course would have forced them to an immediate
discussion of credit for reconstruction purposes,
the need of an internationally guaranteed loan, the function of a recognized international Eco-
nomic Council for the control of food
stuffs
and
raw
material, the world-wide fuel shortage, the
effect of mal-nutrition
on powers of production,
the irreparable results of "hunger oedema." The situation presented material for that genuine and straightforward statesmanship which was absolutely essential to the feeding of Europe's
hungry children. An atmosphere of discussion and fiery knowledge of current conditions as revealed by war, once established, the promoters of the League would experience "the zeal, the tingle,
the excitement of reality" which the League so The promoters of the League had sadly lacked.
A FOOD CHALLENGE
211
unhappily assumed that the rights of the League are anterior to and independent of its functioning,
forgetting that
men
are instinctively
wary
in ac-
cepting at their face value high-sounding claims
which cannot justify themselves by achievement, and that in the long run "authority must go with
function."
stimuli
They
they were
also ignored the fact that the utilizing failed to evoke an
adequate response for this advanced form of

of the League often spoke as if were they defending a too radical document whereas it probably failed to command widespread confidence because it was not radical
human effort. The adherents
enough, because it clung in practice at least to the old self-convicted diplomacy. But the common in a man score of nations could not forget that this
diplomacy had failed to avert a war responsible for the death of ten million soldiers, as many more civilians, with the loss of an unestimated amount of civilization goods, and that all the revolutionary governments since the world began could not be charged with a more ghastly toll of human life and with a heavier destruction of
property.
During those months of uncertainty and anxiety the governments responsible for the devastations of a world war were unaccountably timid in undertaking restoration on the same scale, and
212
WAR
persistently hesitated to discharge their obvious

obligations. It was self-evident that if the
to
League refused become the instrument of a new order, all the
difficult
problems resulting, at least in their present acute form, from a world war, would be turned over to those who must advocate revolution in order to obtain the satisfaction of acknowledged
human needs. It was deplorable that this great human experiment should be entrusted solely to those who must appeal to the desperate need of
the hungry to feed themselves, whereas this demand, in its various aspects seemed to afford a
great controlling motive in the world at the present moment, as political democracy, as religious freedom, had moved the world at other times.
year of the League's existence when the necessity for such action was fairly forced upon its attention.
There were many occasions during the
first
At Paris, Red Cross

itself to
in
May, 1920, when the association of societies was organized, committing
the fight against tuberculosis, to a well considered program of Child Welfare and to other humanitarian measures for devastated
Europe, a letter was received from Mr. Balfour on behalf of the League of Nations. He made an eloquent appeal for succor against the disease afflicting the war worn and underfed populations of central and western Europe. The Association
A FOOD CHALLENGE
of
213
it
Red Cross
Societies replied that
was the
starving man who most readily contracts ajnd spreads disease, and that only if the Allied governments supplied loans to these unhappy nations
could food and medical supplies be secured; that according to a report made recently to them, " 'There were found everywhere never-ending
vicious circles of political
'
paradox and economic with complication, consequent paralysis of national life and industry.' This diagnosis gave a
clue to the situation, indicating that the
League of
Nations must abandon its political treatment of war worn Europe and consider the starving people
as
its
own
concrete problem.
The
recognition of
moral obligation and a generous atfulfill to it, even to the point if need be of tempt losing the life of the League, might have resulted in the one line of action which would most quickly have saved it. If the coal, the iron, the oil and above all the grain had been distributed under international control from the first day of the armistice, Europe might have escaped the starvaThe tion from which she suffered for months. laid the could have foundations League actually of that type of government towards which the world is striving and in which it is so persistently
this obvious
experimenting.
great stumbling block in the way of an earlier realization of this dream of a League of
The
214

is
WAR
Peace has been what
the crux of
its
actual sur-
vival now, the difficulty in interpreting it to the understanding of the common man, grounding it
appealing to his love for human such men, who after all compose the bulk of the citizens in every nation participating
in his affections,
kind.
To
League, the abstract politics of it make little appeal, although they would gladly contribute their utmost to feed the starving. Two and a half million French trade unionists regularly taxed themselves for the children of Austria the British
in the
;
Labor Party
insisted
that
the
British
foreign
policy should rest "upon a humane basis, really caring for all mankind, including colored men, women and children;" and the American Federation of
Labor declared
service in a
its
mighty
kind."
common
readiness to "give a effort for all human
So far as the working

it
it
man
in
any country
expressed himself,
was always
in this direction.
Perhaps
first
was unfair
to expect so
much
in the
years after the establishment of the League, when it was crippled by the uncertain attitude of
the United States.
But
all
the
more
its
friends
longed to find, or rather to release,
some basic
bring together men of good-will on both sides of the Atlantic. close observer of the Paris Peace Conference had
human emotion which should
was an extraordinary fact that ing Europe was the one subject upon which
said that
it
starvit
had
A FOOD CHALLENGE
215
been impossible to engage the attention of the "big four" throughout their long deliberations.
Yet
popular discussions of the functions of the League the feeding of the people appeared constantly like an unhappy ghost that would not
in the
down.
its advocates, the firs! of the in Geneva in convened meeting Assembly certain resolved doubts and reNovember, 1920,
While the first year of that was discouraging for
the
League held much
moved
of us.
all
it
certain inhibitions
from the minds of many
The Assembly demonstrated that after was possible for representatives from the
nations of the earth to get together in order to discuss openly, freely, kindly for the most part, and
even unselfishly, the genuine needs of the world. In spite of the special position of the Great
Powers, this meeting of the Assembly had so increased the moral prestige of the League of Na-
was reasonable to believe that an arwould eventually remove the treaty entanglements which threatened to
tions that
it
ticulate world-opinion
frustrate the very objects of the League.
The
small nations, represented by such men as Nansen and Branting, not by insistence on the doctrine of
the sovereignty and equality of states, but through sheer devotion to world interests, were making the
League effective and certainly more democratic. Perhaps these representatives were acting, not
2i6
only

from
their
WAR
own
preferences or even convict-
ions, but also
from
the
the social impact

life itself.
first
upon them,
from the momentum of

In
many ways
had been like seemed possible that
meeting of the Assembly the beginning of a new era, and it

the public discussion, the
good-will, and the international concern, must eventually affect the European situation. During the following year the League of Nations itself inaugurated and carried out many measures which might be designated as purely humanitarian. In the "Report to the Second of the Assembly League on the Work of the Council and on the measures taken to execute the decisions of the First Assembly" in Geneva on September yth, 1921, under the heading of General International Activities of the
League was
the following
list
C. C. C. C.
i.
2.
The The
The
repatriation of prisoners. relief of Russian refugees.

relief
3. 4.
General
work
in
Europe.
protection of children.
in execution
Under "the measures taken

resolutions
of the
and
recommendation
of
the
As-
sembly," in addition to the reports of the Health Organizations, were others such as the campaign against typhus in Eastern Europe, and the relief
of children in countries affected by the war.
From
A FOOD CHALLENGE
one aspect these
activities
217
the nature
were
all in
of repairing the ravages of the Great War, but it was obvious that further undertakings of the League must be greatly influenced and directed by
these early human efforts. The International Labor Organization, from the first such a hopeful part of the League of Nations,
had
just concluded as
we reached Geneva
in
upon immigration and which the present measures possible protective For many years I had been situation demanded. a Vice President of the American Branch of the International Association for Labour Legislation and had learned only too well how difficult it was
August 1921, a conference
to secure equality of conditions for the labor of The most touching interviews I immigrants.
have ever had upon the League of Nations had been with simple immigrants in the neighborhood of Hull-House, who had many times expressed
the hope that the
League might afford some ade-
quate protection to migratory workmen, to the Italian for instance, who begins harvesting the
crops south of the equator and, following the ripening grain through one country after another, He finally arrives in Manitoba or the Dakotas.
often finds himself far from consular
offices,
en-
counters untold
It
difficulties,
sometimes falling into

the International
absolute peonage.
was
interesting to have
218
WAR
Labour Organization declare in its report that the two great "peoples" who had first recognized the
large part the Office might play in conciliation and protection were ( i ) the Shipowners and Seamen,
as had been shown by the conference at Genoa, and (2) "the immense people of immigrants, the masses who, uprooted from their homelands, ask for some measure of security and protection applicable to all countries and supervised by an in-
ternational authority."
There was something very reassuring in this plain dealing with homely problems with which I had been so long familiar. I had always been
ready to admit that "the solemn declaration of principles which serve to express the unanimity of
the aspirations of humanity have immense value,"
but this was something more concrete, as were other efforts on the part of the Office to defend
labor throughout the world and to push forward
adequate legislation on their behalf. In the reaction, which had gained such headway during the two years of peace, against the generous hopes for a better world order the International
Labour Organization
as well as the
all
League
of Nations was encountering
the hazards of a
could but hope that the former might gain some backing from the international congress, to be held in October, 1921,
great social experiment.
We
A FOOD CHALLENGE
219
of working women, bringing their enthusiasms and achievements from all parts of the world.
challenge was put up fairly and to the Second meeting of the Assembly squarely of the League of Nations by the Russian famine
The food
due to the prolonged drought of 1921. A meeting to consider the emergency had been called in Geneva in August, under the joint auspices of the
International
Red Cross and
Cross Societies.
sentative to
it
We
the League of Red were able to send a repre-
from our Woman's International League almost directly from our Third International Congress in Vienna. There was every posfor using the dire situation in Russia for political ends, both by the Soviet Government
sibility
and by those offering
relief.
On
the other hand,
there was a chance that these millions of starving people, simply because their need was so colossal
quate,
that any other agency would be pitifully inadewould receive help directly from many gov-
It was ernments, united in a mission of good-will. a situation which might turn men's minds from
war and a disastrous peace to great and simple human issues; in such an enterprise the governments would "realize the failure of national coercive power for indispensable ends like food for the people," they would come to a cooperation born of the failure of force.
220
WAR
Dr. Fridjof Nansen, appointed high commisRed Cross meeting in August, after a survey of the Russian Famine regions returned to Geneva for the opening of the Assembly on September 5th, in which he represented Norway, with a preliminary report of Russian conditions. He made a noble plea, which I was privileged to hear, that the delegates in the Assembly should urge upon their governments national loans which should be adequate to furnish the gigantic sums
sioner at the
necessary to relieve twenty-five million starving

people.
As
I listened to this
touching appeal on behalf
of the helpless I was stirred to a new hope for the League. I believed that, although it may take
years to popularize the principles of international cooperation, it is fair to remember that citizens of
all
the nations have already received
much
instruc-
tion in world-religions. To feed the hungry on an international scale might result not only in saving
the League but in that world-wide religious revival which, in spite of many predictions during and since the war, had as yet failed to come. It
was evident in the meeting of the Assembly that Dr. Nansen had the powerful backing of the British delegates as well as others, and it was
therefore a matter for unexpected as well as for
bitter disappointment
when
his plea
was
finally
A FOOD CHALLENGE
denied.
221
This denial was made at the very mo-
ment when
the Russian peasants, in the center of the famine district, although starving, piously abstained from eating the seed grain and said to each other as they scattered it over the ground for their
crop of winter wheat; "We must sow the grain although we shall not live to see it sprout." Did the delegates in the Assembly still retain
the national grievances and animosities so paramount when the League of Nations was organized
in Paris or were they dominated by a fear and hatred of Bolshevism and a panic lest the feeding of Russian peasants should in some wise aid the
purposes of Lenine's government? Again I reflected that these men of the Assembly, as other
men, were still held apart by suspicion and fear, which could only be quenched by motives lying deeper than those responsible for their sense of
estrangement.
This sense of human solidarity for the moment seemed most readily obtained by men leading lives of humble toil and self-denial, as if they might teach a war-weary world that the religious revival which alone would be able to fuse together the hostile nations, could never occur unless there were first a conviction of sin, a repentance for the war itself! As long as men contended that the war was "necessary" or "inevitable" the world
222
WAR
could not hope for a manifestation of that religious impulse which feeds men solely and only because they are hungry.
genuine Society of Nations may finally be evolved by millions of earth's humblest toilers,
whose
needs
lives are
consumed
for
in securing the daily
and their the towards They go stumbling light of better international relations, driven forward because "Man is constantly seeking a new and finer adjustment between his inner emotional deof
existence
themselves
families.
mands and
world
in
the practical
lives."
arraiigemehts of the
which he
CHAPTER XI.
IN EUROPE AFTER
TWO YEARS OF PEACE
Third International Congress was held at in July, 1921, almost exactly two years after the Peace of Versailles had been signed. This third Congress was of necessity unlike the other two in tension and temper and in some reVienna
spects
OUR
more
difficult.
At
the
first
one, held at
The Hague in 1915, women came together not only to make a protest against war but to
present suggestions for consideration at the final Peace Conference, which, as no one could forsee
the duration of the war, everyone then believed might be held within a few months. The second
Congress was held in Zurich in 1919 and, while there was open disappointment over the terms of the Treaty, the Peace Commission was still sitting in Paris, and it was believed not only that the terms would be modified but that the constitution of the League of Nations would be developed and ennobled. Both of the earlier Congresses therefore were hopeful in the sense that the better international relationships which were widely supposed to be attained at the end of the war, were
223
224
still

in the in
WAR
vened
making. The third Congress was conVienna, which, as we realized, had suffered bitterly both from the war and the terms of
Peace.
The women from
the thirty countries
represented there had been sorely disillusioned by their experiences during the two years of peace, and each group inevitably reflected something of
the hopelessness and confusion which had characterized Europe since the war. Nevertheless
these groups of
They
all
united in one thing. alike had come to realize that every
women were
crusade, every beginning of social change, must start from small numbers of people convinced of the righteousness of a cause; that the coming to-
gether of convinced groups is a natural process of growth. Our groups had come together in
Vienna hoping to receive the momentum and sense of validity which results from encountering likeminded people from other countries and to tell each other how far we had been able to translate
perform the of reconciliation, to bring something of healing to the confused situation, and to give an impulse towards more normal relations between differing nations, races and classes, was evident from the first meeting of the Congress. This latter was registered in the various proposals, such as that founded upon experiences of the last year,
conviction into action.
office
The
desire to
that peace missions
composed of women of
differ-
EUROPE AFTER
TWO YEARS OF PEACE

still
225
ent nations should visit the borders
in a dis-
turbed condition and also the countries in which
war had never really ceased. There was constant evidence that the food blockade maintained in some instances long after the war, had outraged a primitive instinct of women almost more than the military operations themselves had done. Women had felt an actual
repulsion against the slow starvation, the general lowering in the health and resistance of entire
populations,
the
anguish
of
the
millions
of
mothers who could not
the primitive obligation of keeping their children alive. There was a certain sternness of attitude concerning political
fulfill
conditions which so wretchedly affected woman's age-long business of nurturing children, as if
women had
means.
first
realized as never before
what war
In spite of the pressure of these questions the public meeting was a memorial to Baroness
Suttner,
whose remarkable book "Ground a wide reading rivalled by no other book perhaps, save "Uncle Tom's Cabin." The book had been an important factor in the history of European militarism and its Austrian author had been honored in many lands.
von
Arms" had had
business sessions of the Congress concerned themselves with the age-old question of
first
The
education.
An
extraordinarily illuminating di-
226
WAR
vergence developed from the conflicting experience of Germany and Austria; speakers from Ger-
many
attributed
largely to their
own
Germany's readiness for war state monopoly of education,
which had, for fifty years, consistently fostered militarism. Austrian women, on the contrary, in whose country one of the most precious gains of
the revolution
is
the transfer of the schools
from
ecclesiastical authority to the control of the secu-
larized state, overflowed with untried confidence

in their
newly acquired power as
citizens.
Among
them was the woman member of the National Department of Education. This discussion was
but one of
indications that the delegates in various stages of political nations represented
many
and
social development.
to be discussing the
periences of its ginnings, as if the delegates to the Congress represented the point of view both of the university and
At moments we seemed same question from the exdecadent end and its promising be-
was held
of the kindergarten. Partly Because the meeting in Vienna, and partly because the International Secretary, Miss Balch, had recently travelled in the
Balkan States
in the interests of
our
League, a large
number of women came from the immediate territory. Miss Balch, years before when collecting material for her book entitled "Our Slavic Fellowcitizens," had made many
friends in Southeastern
Europe and because they
EUROPE AFTER
TWO YEARS OF PEACE
227
appreciated the unusual insight with which she had portrayed the situation then, they were ready to trust her again. Some of them, from
Greece, Bulgaria, Poland and the Ukraine, represented organized branches of the League. Other
groups were from "minorities" in the newly annexed territories, who frankly came in search of
hoping to gain some international recognition and support from even so small and unofficial a Congress as our own. There was an interesting
aid,
group from Croatia, whose reports of the pacifist movement among the Croatian peasants were most
impressive, especially one given by the daughter of Radek, the leader of the movement he believed destined to reassert the non-resistant character of the Slav.
The Saxon group from
the
part of Transylvania which had lately been given
over to Roumania, reported religious
difficulties;
the relation between Bulgaria and Greece with reference to the transfer of nationalities under the
League of Nations plan was set forth by women from both countries. At the evening meeting
these various minorities, fourteen in all, stated their own cases and resolutions were presented only after the substance had been agreed upon by
Thus representatives of both nations involved. the Polish and German women agreed on a resolution about
Upper
Silesia, the
English and Irish
delegates on the Irish question.
Touching ad-
228

made
WAR
dresses were
for the Armenians, for the
Zionists and, by a colored

States,
woman from the United on behalf of her own people who were not
nominally a minority, although they often suffered as such. This evening's program cohered with
the discussion:
that
it is
"How
from
can a population, feeling

injustice, strive to right its
suffering
wrongs without violence?" There was a very sympathetic report of the Ghandi movement given
by Miss Picton Turberville, who had lived in India and who preached the following Sunday for our Congress in the English Church in Vienna. We were also told of a remarkable group centering about Bilthoven in Holland, with some detail as to how Norway and Sweden had accomplished their separation without bloodshed, and of the earlier non-resistant phases of the Sinn Fein movement. Nearly every country represented by
a delegation brought
some report of the "non-
military
movement," in which large or smaller numbers of their fellow-citizens had pledged themselves to take no part in war or in its preFour of our own branches, all of them paration. in countries recently at war, had made this promise of non-cooperation in war a test of membership in the national organizations. This was part of the revolt against the precautions the governments of Europe were every-
where taking
in
regard to
pacifist teaching."
Even
EUROPE AFTER
TWO
YEARS OF PEACE
229
neutral Switzerland had passed a measure in its Assembly, which was still however to be submitted
to a
referendum of the people, that anyone teach-
ing a man of military age in such wise as to lessen his enthusiasm for military service should be liable
well-known imprisonment. in a Swiss theological professor University had reon the that he could no longer exsigned ground
to three years'
men
New Testament to the Holland was considering similar regulations, and even in those countries where universal military service was forbidden by the terms of the Peace Treaty, as in Hungary and
pound the doctrines of the
in his classes.
Bavaria, the almost military rule temporarily established in both of them made any form of
It was peace propaganda extremely dangerous. as if the war spirit itself had to be sustained by
force, as if its
open discussion of
plications.
afraid of any moral bases and social imThe military parties seemed more
its
own adherents were
and more to confine their appeal to "the sense of security" and to use the old "fear of attack"
motives.
We had a brilliant report on what our organization
had been
in
able to
do from our Geneva head-
quarters Nations.
with the League of This report was accepted with apconnection
proval authorizing a continuance of the same activity, but there was as usual a minority of the
230
WAR
delegates who distrusted the imperialistic designs of the larger nations, and yet another group who believed that, while a useful agency for many international activities, the League of Nations could never secure peace until the most basic changes were made both in its purpose and personnel. So we once more took no official action regarding the League of Nations, but went on in a modus vivendi, allowing the greatest latitude to our International Headquarters and to our National Branches. On the other hand, the Dutch Section
brought a carefully prepared indictment of the construction of the League and urged work for
changes
Treaty as a paramount obligation. The few Communists who were delegates to the Congress the word used in Europe in a some*
in the
what
technical sense to designate the members of the Left in the Socialist Party were perhaps the
there,
most discouraged people
because
their
movement
in
Russia and elsewhere had become so
absolutely militaristic. Holding to their pacifist had cost them their standing in their principles
party. Although they may have "come to us far so as public opinion was concerned, high"
own
world at that moment so needed the companionship which pacifist groups might give them: in the eyes of the bourgeoisie themselves, no one could put pacifism into practice These few more beneficially for all Europe.
no people
in the
EUROPE AFTER
TWO YEARS OF PEACE
231
Communist delegates were for the most part reasonable, but all of them were profoundly discouraged.
most comment and which apparently aroused that white heat of interest attaching to any discussion,
resolution which excited the
in the press,
The
however remote, of property

troduced by a group
who
privileges, was infelt that, as we constantly
urged the revolutionist to pacific methods and denounced violence between the classes as we did between the nations, we should logically "work to awaken and strengthen among members of the possessing classes the earnest wish to transform the economic system in the direction of social
justice."
The methods
suggested in the resolu-
tion and voted upon subsequently were "by means of taxation, death duties and reform in land laws," all of them in operation in many of the countries
The momentary represented in the Congress. sense of panic aroused by this reasonable discussion,
was an
indication of that unrestrained fear
of Bolshevism encountered everywhere in Europe. It was hard to determine whether it was the idea
itself
which was so terrifying or the army of the

Bolshevists
to
threatening theory regardless of "consent."
Russian
enforce
At any
rate, a
European public found it hard to believe that anything even remotely connected with private property could be discussed upon its merits and
232
WAR
was convinced that
the subject jnust have been introduced either by agents provocateurs, or by propagandists paid with Russian money. The war
to the
propaganda had demonstrated

possible
it is
world how
"to put over" an opinion if enough and ability money are expended and Europeans unthought they had learned to detect it.
We
doubtedly
felt
for an instant that icy breath of
fear blowing through Europe from the mysterious steppes of Russia.
Throughout the Congress we were conscious

that peace theories turned into action won the complete admiration of the delegates as nothing else
This was instanced when the Congress was eloquently addressed by a Belgian delegate, Madame Lucie Dejardin. She had been carried into Germany in January, 1915, and worked there in one camp after another, until, developing tuberculosis, she was invalided to Switzerland in July, 1918. Upon her return to Belgium she had an association of those who had been organized
did.
imprisoned in Germany, civilians as well as returned Belgian soldiers, that they might feed German and Austrian children. She reported to the
Congress that the association had received 2,000 She gave of these children as guests in Belgium.
this information incidentally in the speech she
was
her
making
to thank the various nations represented
there for
what they had done for the
relief of
EUROPE AFTER
own
TWO YEARS OF
,
PEACE
233
This Belgian woman was, compatriots. who had touched bottom of women many typical
as it were in the valley of human sorrow and had found a spring of healing there. We found everywhere in Austria the impossible situation so often described as "a combination of
concrete obstacles with psychological deterrents,

all
operating through a degraded and constantly
falling currency."
The
effective ability in labor,

life,
business, domestic and intellectual
had
all
sustained
heavy
damages
through
the
war,
through the blockade, through the Peace terms and through the post-war economic policy. All
the people
tions.
The
had been piteously reduced by privaprofessional and artistic people had
gradually lowered their standard of living to that below the health line. In addition the insolvency
culture
threatened to destroy the collective resources of and education: everywhere we were told
that there
cals
was no money
to
buy books and periodi-
for long-established libraries, that schools were closing, that orchestras were forced to dis-
band.
ties
The
students' feeding in various Universi-
which we visited both in Austria and in the neighboring states seemed somewhat like the students' commons we are all accustomed to see in endowed institutions, but it was a distinct shock to be invited to a luncheon with distinguished professors who were also eating subsidized ra-
234
tions.
So many of these men were accepting posts
elsewhere that Austria was threatened with the loss of her most brilliant scholars.
There were many forms of
relief
throughout
the city of Vienna. naturally saw most of the American Relief Administration established
We
by Mr. Hoover, and of the Friends' Service Committee, with which several Hull-House residents were identified. The head of the latter, Dr. Hilda Clark, from England, had been in Vienna during the armistice and had brought back an early report of the children in whose behalf she had since organized a large unit of relief. This fed thousands of children below school age as
well as groups of the aged in all classes of society who had poignantly felt that they had no right to The live at the expense of food for the young.
Quakers were much beloved everywhere, as were other groups from all of the neutral, and many of the belligerent countries in Europe who were
coming to the rescue of the Viennese children, taking them out of Austria even as far as northern Sweden that they might have better care and food. They were alleviating the situation in hundreds of
in spite of these united efforts only 21 children out of a 100 were as yet approximately normal. It was as if the world, aghast at
ways although
what had happened
to these children,
was putting
EUROPE AFTER
that
TWO YEARS
OF PEACE
235
into the situation all the inventiveness
and resource
human compassion could
devise.
was developing what might prove
to be a
Out of it new and
higher standard for the care of children, one which
might become a norm for the whole world to use. Dr. Pirquet's clinic, with its carefully devised tests for nutrition and growth, the thousands of school children fed by the A.R.A., with the attendant medical examination, the huge barracks everywhere turned into sanatoria for tubercular and
convalescent children, all suggested a higher standard of public care than that obtained in any other city. Even the educational requirements
seemed pushed forward by the dire experience I have never heard children sing more beautifully, nor seen them dance with more grace and charm, than those Austrian children celebrating the 4th
;
of July in the American Milk Relief Barracks, while a new possibility in children's drawing was
That this new being set by Professor Cizek. standard would be Vienna's gift to the world in
exchange for what the world was trying to do for her children was perhaps the one ray of light in what could but be a dark future. In talks with the Austrian Food Administrator and with the Minister of Agriculture; in lectures given to the Congress by the economist, Professor Hertz, and by the Minister of Public Welfare, there was al-
236
WAR
inevitable conclusion, although stated with restraint, that the Peace Treaty had placed Austria in an impossible position.
ways the
Perhaps
it
was because the Viennese were
pleased to have their city selected as the seat for an international Congress, that they extended us
such boundless hospitality. The Congress was received in the offices of the Foreign Minister, by the President of the Republic and the entire diplo-
matic corps; in the City Hall by the Mayor and the heads of the Administrative Departments we were entertained by various musical societies, and
;
everything possible was done to demonstrate that an old cultivated city was making welcome members
of
an
international
body.
officials
hospitality, in
which
women
This public took such a
natural and reasonable place, was in marked conIn trast to my former experience in Austria.
1913 I had attended the Suffrage Meeting in Vienna presided over by the mother of the present At that time President of the Austrian Republic. the Austrian women were prohibited by law from
belonging to any organization with a political aim. I returned eight years later, as I said at a public
reception in the City Hall, to find full suffrage ex-
tended to all women over twenty-one years old, with eleven women sitting in the lower House of Parliament, four in the Upper House, and twentythree as
members of
the City Council.
In the face
EUROPE AFTER
TWO YEARS OF PEACE

a
237
of these rapid changes, who would venture to say that peace or any other unpopular cause, was
hopeless.
Even
seemed not so
containing
new basis for bread peace remote when the large audience,
officials,
many Austrian
interest
listened with
Frenchwoman, Mile. profound Melin, who, although her devastated home was
to
a
not yet
rebuilt,
held
war
itself as
an institution
responsible for the wretched world in which we are all living. She spoke superbly then, as she did once more, the Thursday following the Con-
when again in the City Hall she addressed an audience of wounded soldiers who applauded to the echo this Frenchwoman telling them there
gress,
could be no victor in
modern warfare.
At the end of the Congress an International Summer School was held in the charming old town
of Salzburg. Students came from twenty different countries, the largest number from Great
The lectures, in English, French and were delivered by men and women from German, a dozen nations on the psychological, the economic, the historic and biological causes of war. They were provocative of thought and discussion in the class room itself and later among the eager
Britain.
who constantly arranged special meetone every morning at seven o'clock on a mountain top. Again the impression we received, as in Vienna at the Congress itself, was one of
students,
ings,
238
WAR
and energy, as of a fresh growth pushThe Movement of ing through old traditions.
vitality
Youth represented by many of the German students was making a fresh demand upon life for reality and simplicity which was in strange contrast to a contention made by one of the lecturers on science when he compared "the will to possess
with the will to live," showing, with a wealth of
illustration, that the
former was apparently belatter.
coming stronger than the

the
discussion at
this
Vienna Congress brought support to
theory, contending that it was possible for people to oppose the socialization of wealth while at the
same time they advocated the conscription of life. Delegates from two of the war-stricken countries, one group from each side of the recent war, were quite certain that future wars might be prevented if at the very moment that war was declared an
automatic conscription of property could take place similar to the conscription of young men.
And
yet
the
very ardor
and
vitality
of
our
younger delegates, led by the able and spirited young secretary of the German section, Gertrude Baer, constantly challenged any theory which could balance property in the pan of the scales
against
human
it
life.
Was
!
not rather that youth, "fashioning the
glory of the years to be," was transforming property Certainly we felt everywhere in the midst
239
of the political depression both urge and zest in

the efforts of one country after another to restore the land to the people, or at least to divide up the
huge estates into smaller holdings. In Hungary, for instance, Barnar Berga, the Minister of Agriculture under the Karoly Government, had been
succeeded by a peasant named Sabot, who in the midst of the reaction was putting through radical
land reforms of which he talked to us with enthusiasm.
The Czecho-Slovak Government was dividing the estates in the annexed territories among the
returned Russian legionaries and other soldiers, and their projected reforms reached much fur-
Everywhere there was acquiescence if not a "consent" to the housing arrangements which practically all the. cities had made conservative
ther.
;
women
had
in
told us with a certain pride of what they done to conform to the municipal regulations
making room for other families within their Sometimes houses, and that it was "not so bad." this sympathetic report and the universal concern
for the starving children, gave one hope that this impulse to care for the victims of the war
might become as wide-spread as
its
devastat-
ing misery, expressing itself not only through the care of children but in many other ways, such as
the governmental subsidy to the bread supply which was still regularly made in Austria. Would
240
this

forming the basis of
WAR
impulse gradually subside into a "suppressed
futile and disturbing would it be seized by the doctrinaires who were already trading so largely upon the normal human impulses exaggerated by war, or would it finally be captured by the friends of mankind? Could not this impulse to nurture the wretched be canalized and directed by enlarged governmental agencies, and was not that the problem before the statesmen of Europe?
desire,"
social unrest,
The conditions in Southeastern Europe as we met them that hot summer of 1921 might well We saw challenge the highest statesmanship. much of starvation and we continually heard of the appalling misery in all of the broad belt lying between the Baltic and the Black Seas, to say nothing of Russia to the east and Armenia to the south. Even those food resources which were produced in Europe itself and should have been available for instant use, were prevented from
satisfying the desperate human needs by "jealous and cruel tariff regulations surrounding each nation like the barbed wire entanglements
around a
concentration camp." covert war was being carried on by the use of import duties and protective tariffs to such an extent that we felt as if eco-
nomic hostility, having been legitimatized by the food blockades of the war, was of necessity being sanctioned by the very commissions which were the
EUROPE AFTER
TWO
YEARS OF PEACE
itself.
241
outgrowth of the Peace Conference
We
saw that the smaller
states, desperately protect-
ing themselves against each other, but imitated the great Allies with thefr protectionist policies,
with their colonial monopolies and preferences. This economic war may have been inevitable,
between successsion States of the former Austrian Empire with their inherited oppressions and grievances. Yet we longed for a Customs
especially
Union, a Pax Economica for these new nations,
who
a
failed to see that "the price of nationality
is
workable
doomed
cerned."
internationalism, otherwise it is so far as the smaller states are con-
arrived in Europe in the midst of the prolonged discussion as to the amount of the "reparations" to be paid by Germany. This discussion
We
by the Supreme Council had f ocussed more powerfully than ever before the antagonism between
two conceptions of international trade; one, that widest form of cooperation which would afford
the greatest yield of wealth to the entire world; the other, that conflict of activities and interests
by which the members of one nation may, through governmental action, benefit themselves at the cost of the members of other nations. The latter doctrine was of course openly applied to the
enemy
nations, but naturally
it
could not be con-
fined to them.
242

had
established our
WAR
the
We
own bakery
in
Vienna,
that delegates might not "eat bread
away from
and special food arrangements had Yet been made for our students in Salzburg.
Viennese,"
there
was always the shadow of
the insufficient
food supply. In the region of Salzburg, children were being fed by the A.R.A. throughout a countryside which ordinarily exported milk products.
The
under-nourished students
who
filled
the streets of the music-loving city during the Mozart week, which was celebrated by daily con-
were a silent became imthe action the report with on long-delayed patient Economic of the Commission sent to study Austria's needs, and felt that food and raw materials must come quickly if Austria were to be saved from an economic and moral collapse. The situation as we saw it seemed to bear out
certs during the term of our School, reproach to one's prosperity.
We
completely Norman Angell's theory of the futility of war. As he stated in "The Fruits of Victory,"
published
technical
at
that
time;
soil
"The
it
continent
as
whole has the same knowledge

is is
and natural resources and

fed
its
as
when
population,
but there
suffering and want on every hand.

fatal to social living.
War
psychology
The
ideas which produce war the fears out of which it grows and the passions which it feeds produce
a state of mind that ultimately renders impossible
EUROPE AFTER
duced and
life
TWO YEARS OF
PEACE
243
the cooperation by which alone wealth can be pro-
maintained."
The
situation therefore resolves itself into the

ideas, into the
dominance of
makes war
possible.
Even
temper of mind which the pro-war newsit.
papers were then recognizing
leading
journal, a consistent apologist for the great war, had written: "Europe will never recover com-
posure and peace, nor can an acceptable and workable compromise be achieved, until the consequences of the method of coercion are understood
and the method
itself
abandoned
in the interest
of a method of consent."
And
tion
so we came back to what our own organizawas trying to do, to substitute consent for co-
ercion, a will to peace for a belief in war.
Like
all
educational efforts, from the preaching in churches to the teaching in schools, at moments it must
seem
and vague, but after all the activities of can be changed in no other way than by changing the current ideas upon which it
ineffectual
life
is
conducted.
The members
of the
Woman's
International
certainly
League for Peace and Freedom had
learned from their experience during the war that widely accepted ideas can be both dominating and
But we still believed it possible to modify, to direct and ultimately to change current ideas, not only through discussion and careful preall
powerful.
244
WAR
sentation of facts, but also through the propaganda of the deed.
In accord with the latter, one German section, after our Congress in Vienna had sent a group of
women
filled
into
Upper
Silesia,
which at that time was
with ardent nationalists both for
Germany
and Poland, each hotly presenting the claims of his own side. The group of women entered the contested territory, not to promote either national
claim but to counsel confidence in the good intentions of those making the final decision; to preach
modities
that freedom of exchange in coal or other comis more basic to economic life than any
detail of political boundaries; to abate the hypernationalistic feeling which was responsible for
actual
warfare
it
between
the
non-contending
as I
peoples. In fact
seemed to me during that summer

in their daily
visited one National Section after another, that

all
of our
members
walk and con-
versation had been bearing unequivocal testimony
This impression against war and its methods. was equally vivid at the public meeting at Budapest where Vilma Glucklich presided sitting next to a police officer; as it was later at a meeting in London where Mrs. Swanwick, occupying the platform with a distinguished economist, brilliantly
inaugurated a frank discussion of post-war conditions in Europe.
EUROPE AFTER
The
TWO YEARS
OF PEACE
245
International Office of our League
was
established in a charming old house in Geneva. It seemed to me that June day of 1921, as I went
through its rose-filled garden, that we might be profoundly grateful if our organization was able in any degree to push forward the purposes of the League of Nations and to make its meaning clearer. Catherine Marshall of England, our
referent on the League, had prepared a full and encouraging report for the Vienna Congress of
what our
tion.
office
had been
able to
do
in that direc-
Personal friends and other members of the Secretariat had taken great pains to have us see
and understand the working of that new-found device, with its elaborated Sections and Standing Committees. An ample building was filled with men and a few women, committed to study questions in the interest of
particular one. nationally," as a
many nations, not of any They were "paid to think intermember of the Secretariat put it.
And
had
because they were really thinking and not

a
merely falling into mere diplomatic discussion, we

sense
of a fresh
method of approach,
whether we talked to
Sir Eric
Drummond,
to
Mrs.
Wicksall of the Mandates Section, or to the younger men so filled with hope for the future of
the League.
Our Congress in Vienna was arranged in the midst of Austria's desolation by a group of high-
246
WAR
women led by the brilliant Frau Yella Hertzka who had never during the long days of
spirited
war or the ensuing peace hesitated war could achieve nothing. And although we were so near to
with
its
to assert that
the great war starved survivors, we had ventured at the very opening of the Congress to assert that war is not a natural activity
millions of
dead and
its
for mankind, that large masses of men should fight against other large masses is abnormal, both
biological and ethical point of view. stated that it is a natural tendency of men to
from the
We
come
into friendly relationships with ever larger and larger groups, and to live constantly a more ex-
required no courage to predict that the endless desire of men would at last assert
tended
life.
It
that desire which torments them almost like an unappeased thirst, not to be kept apart but to come to terms with one another. It is the very spring of life which underlies all social organizaitself,
tions
and
political associations.
AN AFTER WORD
WE
returned to the United States in October to
find the
enthusiasm for the International Confer-
ence on the Limitation of Armaments, convened by President Harding for Armistice day, Nov.
nth, 1921, running at full tide. During the autumn and early winter, women's organizations of all kinds were eagerly advocating limitations of armaments and many of them had united with other public bodies in establishing headquarters in Washington from which information and propaganda were constantly issued.
Seldom had any public movement received more universal support from American women; an estimate issued by the National League of Women
cations
als
Voters stated that more than a million communihad been sent to Washington by individu-
and organizations expressing desire for some form of an association of nations. The Section for the United States of The
Woman's
International League
moved
its
head-
quarters from
New York
to
Washington for
the period of the Conference.

247
Many
of our
Na-
tional Sections in their respective capitals
had held
248
WAR
public meetings on Nov. nth advocating disarmament and those National Sections whose govern-
ments were represented at Washington had sent "manifestos" to their own Commissioners in addition to the one sent on behalf of the International body authorized at Vienna. We felt our
voices but an infinitesimal strain in the chorus
of praise for the Conference and while we hoped for much more than the limitation so finely advocated by Secretary Hughes we were able to unite with millions of fellow-citizens in believing the historic gathering to be an earnest of the time
when
friendly conference and joint responsibility shall supersede the secrecy and suspicion leading
to war.
disposition to discuss genuine world problems in a spirit of frankness and good will, in
The
marked
contrast to traditional international gatherings, led to a wide-spread hope that the Conference had inaugurated a precedent that might
in
result
the
successive
throwing
off
of
Com-
mittees and Commissions as required to deal with world situations and so institute a kind of world
organization which should be a natural growth, in contrast although not therefore in opposition,
to the carefully constituted
It
League of Nations.
was
also encouraging that the Conference ex-
hibited an acute consciousness of the hideous state
AN AFTER WORD
fusion.
249
of a world facing starvation smcl industrial con-
strong public movement developed for the immediate calling of sessions during an international conference to consider Economic
its
The
problems,
testified to the
currency of this sense of
world disaster which could no longer be confined to Europe. Throughout these months we were all conscious of the desperate need of food for millions of the starving Russians. But whether I was on a committee to secure funds, lecturing serving
before a State Agricultural Convention, asking the farmers for corn to be sent abroad in the form
of meal and
oil or urging congressmen to vote for an adequate appropriation with which to buy for Russia the surplus crop of grain in this country, I was constantly haunted by a sense of colossal
mal-adjustment, by the lack of intelligence in international affairs.

directly
An American Quaker who came

district in
from the famine
Samara
told
us of the desperate people living on powdered grass and roots cooked with the hoofs of horses
that
semblance of a flat cake that they knew full well that even such food would be exhausted by the first of the year and that unless help came from abroad, few of them could survive until spring. She told of the
it
might
:
stick together in the
farm machinery
peasants
left
who
could drag
on the roadside by desperate it with them no farther
250
WAR
dreary search for food, of the possible abandonment of a large acreage which had for years supplied millions of people with bread. It
in their
was
as if in the midst of the present starvation,
dragon's teeth of future misery were being sown. In December, 1921, we hailed with relief and
gratitude the appropriation made by the United States Congress toward the feeding of Russia.
This appropriation of twenty million dollars not only maintained the humanitarian traditions of the United States but because it openly recognized the relation between the surplus grain in America and the dearth in Russia, acknowledged the economic interdependence of nations and the
necessity for more intelligent cooperation. On the whole H. G. Wells doubtless registered a widespread reaction when he declared that
throughout the Conference on the Limitation of
Armaments, his moods had fluctuated between hope and despair. His final words in a remarkable series of articles so nearly express what I had heard in many countries, from our members during the summer, that I venture to quote them
here:
I know that I at Peace World great
"But
believe so firmly in this that lies so close to our
own, ready to come into being as our wills turn toward it, that I must needs go about this present world of disorder and dark-
AN AFTER WORD
251
ness like an exile doing such feeble things as I can towards the world of my desire,
now hopefully, now bitterly, may happen before I die."
as the
moods
APPENDIX
WOMEN'S INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE FOR PEACE AND FREEODM
International Headquarters, College, Geneva, Switzerland.
left
6,
rue du Vieux-
Imagine that you are in Geneva, that you have behind you the lake, and the Jardin Anglais with its great fountain and have turned up the Rue d'ltalie. In front of you, then, you see an old grey wall, overhung with creepers, with the date 1777 let into its side, and a broad stone stairway leading up to a quaint old house in a
charming garden.
Here
are the international
headquarters of the League.
WHAT
It is a
IS
THIS LEAGUE?
federation of
women
with organized
sections in 21 of the
most important countries, and scattered members and correspondents from Iceland to Fiji; women pledged to do everything
in their
power
to create international relations
based
on
good-will,
making war impossible;
women who seek to establish equality between men and women, and who feel the necessity of
253
254
WAR
educating the coming generations to help to realize these principles.
that
The League we are not
is
made up
of people
who
believe
obliged to choose
between violence
and passive acceptance of unjust conditions for ourselves or others who believe, on the contrary, that courage, determination, moral power, gen;
erous indignation, active good-will, can achieve their ends without violence. believe that
We
weapon although men

turn to
in
it
experience condemns force as a self defeating are still so disposed to

in
education, in dealing with crime, or effecting preventing social changes, and above all in carrying out national policies.
that
We
new methods, free must be worked out for ending

believe
from, violence, abuses and for
undoing wrongs, as well as for achieving positive

ends.
CONGRESS AND SUMMER SCHOOLS

keeps the League together is its common program as voted at its Congresses. The first of these was held at the Hague in 1915, the second at Zurich in 1919, the last at Vienna in 1921.
What
very successful international Summer School was held at Salzburg in August, 1921. National Sections. The addresses of our Sections
organized national branches are as follows: spondents
or
corre-
APPENDIX
Austria:
Australia
:
255
Frau Yella Hertzka, Hofburg,

Michaelertor,
Wien
I.
Miss Eleanor M. Moore, 40 Evelina Rd., Toorak, Melbourne. Mrs. H. S. Bayley, "Runnymede," Newton near Hobart,
Tasmania. Mrs. E. A. Guy, Rockhampton, Queensland. Mme. Anna Theodorova, Oborichte 26, Sofia.
Bulgaria:
Mme.
Canada:
Jenny
Dojilowa
Patteff,
Bourgas. Mrs. Harriet Dunlop Prenter, 92 Westminster Avenue, Toronto.
Denmark:
Miss Thora Daugaard, Danske

nistraede
Finland:
Kvinders Fredsbureau, Kompag2, Copenhagen. Miss Annie Furuhjelm, 14 Kasarngaten, Helsingfors. Gabrielle Duchene, 10 Ave.
France
Mme.
Germany:
Gr. Britain:
de Tokio, Paris. Frl. Lida Gustava Heymann, 12 Kaulbachstr, Miinchen. Mrs. H. M. Swanwick, 55 Gower
St.,
London W.
C.
i.
Greece:
Hungary:
Ireland:
Italy:
c/o Mme. Parren, 44 rue Epire, Athene. Miss Vilma Gliicklich, 41 Katona Joszef ut, Budapest V. Miss Louie Bennett, 39 Harcourt St., Dublin. Signora Rosa Genoni, 6 Via Kramer, Milan.
Bellini,
Mme. Olga
256

:
WAR
Netherlands
New Zealand:
Norway
Poland:
:
Mme. Cor. Ramondt-Hirschmann, 5 Valeriusplein, Amsterdam. Mrs. E. Gibson, 56 St. Mary's

Rd., Auckland.
Miss Martha Larsen, Sondre Huseby, Skoien, pr. Kristiania.
Mme.
Daszynska-Golinska,
Sibyl-
Sweden
Wspelna79/7, Warsaw. Miss Matilde Widegren,

legatan 59, Stockholm.
:
Switzerland
Mme.
Clara Ragaz, 68 Gloriastr,
Zurich.
Ukraine
Mile. Dr. N. Surowzowa, Chimanistr, 29/4, Wien XIX. Mrs. George Odell, 1623 St., \Yashington, D. C. Addresses of correspondents and
U.S.A.:
Belgium
corresponding societies. Mile. Lucie Dejardin, 48 rue

Julienne, Liege.
:
St.
Czecho-Slov.
Mme. Kovarova-Machova,
kalska 1973, Prague
II.
Pado-
Japan
Mme. Pavla Moudra, Neveklov. Mr. Isamu Kawakami, Corres-
pondence and Publicity Bureau, 10 Omote Sarugaku Cho Kanda, Tokyo.
Miss Tano Jodai, Jap. Women's University Kaishikawa, Tokyo.
Mexico
Mrs. George D. Shadbourne,
Jr.,
La
Cal.
Mishad
Sacramento
Apartment, 1875 San Francisco, St.,
APPENDIX
257
Peru:
Miss Elena Landazuri, 3* Cordoba 77, Mexico City. Miss Dora Mayer, Loreto altos
45, Callao. Mme. Emilian, 59 bantzilor, Bukarest.
Roumania:
Jugo-Slavia:
rue
Doro-
Mme.
Dedier, Ministere de Po-
litique Sociale, Belgrade.
Dr. Zdenka Smrekar, Kumicic ut, III., Zagreb. Mme. Aloysia Stebi, Dunajska Cesta 25> Ljubljana.

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PEACE AND BREAD

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

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dedicated in affectionate gratitude

have never failed the writer either in

minded people who,

occasionally reminded of a dictum found

cause, suffer constantly

therefore, that even the kindest

of readers must perforce

"Peace and Bread

to convey to the reader the inevitability of the

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE GREAT WAR

THE NEUTRAL CONFERENCE PLUS THE

WOMAN'S PEACE PARTY

REVIEW OF BREAD RATIONS AND WOMAN'S

SPECULATION ON BREAD LABOR AND SLOGANS , ,

AFTER THE UNITED STATES ENTERED THE

IN EUROPE DURING THE ARMISTICE

FOOD CHALLENGE TO THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE GREAT WAR.

America of the open-

not the march

approved by the press.

inevitably interrupt all orderly social ad-

PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF

The Carnegie Endowment

workers held the

BEGINNING OF THE GREAT

the part of those

devoted their energies to the reduction of devastating poverty. deavor to nurture

believed that the enlife

All of us, through long ex-

PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF

later that pacifists

In the light of the charge made indifferent to the claims of

justice it is interesting to recall that

also believed that

not only because war

which foster the

BEGINNING OF THE GREAT

results of these various discussions

Mr. Paul Kellogg,

wide circulation. Reading it now, it appears to be somewhat exaggerated in tone<because we have

of these meetings were

of the social workers as they

two of the men