Peace and bread in time of war

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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.

Press of

J. J. Little & Ives Company
New 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

The following pages are the outgrowth of an
attempt to write a brief history of the efforts for
peace made by a small group of women in the
United States during the European War, and of
their connection with the women of other coun-
tries, 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 in-
creasingly reluctant to interpret the motives of
other people that at length I confined all anal-
ysis of motives to my own. As my reactions were
in no wise unusual, I can only hope that the auto-
biographical portrayal of them may prove to be
fairly typical and interpretative of many like-
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 en-
titled "The Arena," which read somewhat in this
wise: "We do not possess our ideas, they pos-
sess 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 us. Our portion was the odium
accorded those who, because they are not allowed
to state their 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
of readers must perforce still look at our group
through the distorting spectacles he was made to
wear during the long period of war propaganda.

As the writing progressed I entitled the book
"Peace and Bread in Time of War." Not because
the first two words were the touching slogan of
war-weary Russian peasants, but because peace
and bread had become inseparably connected in
my mind.

I shall consider myself fortunate if I am able
to convey to the reader the inevitability of the
relationship.

Hull-House,
Chicago.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

FOREWORD . vii

I AT THE BEGINNING OF THE GREAT WAR . . i

II THE NEUTRAL CONFERENCE PLUS THE FORD

SHIP 26

III PRESIDENT WILSON'S POLICIES AND THE

WOMAN'S PEACE PARTY 49

IV A REVIEW OF BREAD RATIONS AND WOMAN'S

TRADITIONS 73

V A SPECULATION ON BREAD LABOR AND WAR

SLOGANS , , 91

VI AFTER THE UNITED STATES ENTERED THE WAR 107

VII PERSONAL REACTIONS IN TIME OF WAR . . 132

VIII IN EUROPE DURING THE ARMISTICE . . . 152

IX THE AFTERMATH OF WAR 178

X THE FOOD CHALLENGE TO THE LEAGUE OF

NATIONS 199

XI 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 I.

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE GREAT WAR.

WHEN the news came to America of the open-
ing hostilities which were the beginning of the
European Conflict, the reaction against war, as
such, was almost instantaneous throughout the
country. This was most strikingly registered in
the newspaper cartoons and comments which ex-
pressed astonishment that such an archaic institu-
tion should be revived in modern Europe. A pro-
cession 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
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 some-
times with poignancy the conviction that a war
would inevitably interrupt all orderly social ad-

2 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.

The Carnegie Endowment sent several people
lecturing through the country upon the history of
the Peace movement and the various instru-
mentalities designed to be used in a war crisis such
as this. I lectured in twelve of the leading col-
leges, where I found the audiences of young
people both large and eager. The questions
which they put were often penetrating, sometimes
touching or wistful, but almost never bellicose or
antagonistic. Doubtless there were many stu-
dents of the more belligerent type who did not at-
tend the lectures and occasionally a professor, in-
variably one of the older men, rose in the audience
to uphold the traditional glories of warfare. I
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 lead-
ing colleges of the East were eager for knowledge
as to all the international devices which had been
established for substituting rational negotiation
for war. There seemed to have been a somewhat
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 3

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 de-
vastating poverty. We believed that the en-
deavor to nurture human life even in its most
humble and least promising forms had crossed
national boundaries; that those who had given
years to its service had become convinced that
nothing of social value can be obtained save
through wide-spread public opinion and the co-
operation of all civilized nations. Many mem-
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 na-
tions, were convinced that a friendly and cooper-
ative relationship was constantly becoming more
possible between all peoples. We believed that
war, seeking its end through coercion, not only in-
terrupted but fatally reversed this process of co-
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.

4 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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 re-
versal 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. In the light of the charge made
later that pacifists were indifferent to the claims of
justice it is interesting to recall that we thus early
emphasized the fact that a sense of justice had be-
come 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 fellow-
ship, and that a finely tempered sense of justice,
which alone is of any service in modern civiliza-
tion, 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 will to justice. We were there-
fore certain that if war prevailed, all social efforts
would be cast into an earlier and coarser mold.

BEGINNING OF THE GREAT WAR 5

The results of these various discussions were
finally put together by Mr. Paul Kellogg, editor
of The Survey, and the statement entitled
"Toward 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 wide-
spread war with its inevitable consequences of
divisions and animosities.

The heartening effects of these meetings were
long felt by many of the social workers as they
proceeded in their different 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
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 private-
ly holding to their convictions as best they might;
a third, although condemning war in the abstract
were convinced of the righteousness of this par-
ticular war and that it would end all wars; still
others felt, after war was declared in the United
States, that they must surrender all private judg-
ment, and abide by the decision of the majority.

I venture to believe, however, that none of the

6 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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 I became chairman of
what was called the Women's Peace Party. The
impulse for the latter organization came from
Europe when, in the early winter of 1914, the
great war was discussed from the public platform
in the United States by two women, well known
suffragists and publicists, who nationally repre-
sented opposing sides of the conflict. Mrs. Peth-
ick Lawrence of England first brought to Ameri-
can audiences a series of "War Aims" as defined
by the "League of Democratic Control" in Lon-
don, and Mde. Rosika Schwimmer, coming from
Budapest, hoped to arouse American women to
join their European sisters in a general protest
against war. Occasionally they spoke from the
same platform in a stirring indictment of "the
common enemy of mankind." They were unwil-
ling to leave the United States until they had or-
ganized at least a small group pledged to the ad-

BEGINNING OF THE GREAT WAR 7

vocacy of both objects; the discussion of reason-
able terms of peace, and a protest against war as
a method of settling international difficulties.

The Women's Peace Party itself was the out-
come of a two days' convention held in Washing-
ton concluding a series of meetings in different
cities addressed by Mrs. Lawrence and Madame
Schwimmer. The "call" to the convention was is-
sued 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 national-
ization of their manufacture.

3. Organized opposition to militarism in our
own country.

4. Education of youth in the ideals of peace.

5. Democratic control of foreign policies.

6. The further humanizing of governments
by the extension of the suffrage to women.

7. "Concert of Nations" to supersede "Bal-
ance of Power."

8. Action towards the gradual re-organization
of the world to substitute Law for War.

9. The substitution of economic pressure and
of non-intercourse for rival armies and navies.

10. Removal of the economic causes of war.

8 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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 first one, as a plan for "continuous media-
tion," had been presented to the convention by
Miss Julia G. Wales of the University of Wiscon-
sin, who had already placed it before the legis-
lature of the State. Both houses had given it
their approval, and had sent it on with recom-
mendations for adoption to the Congress of the
United States. The plan was founded upon the
assumption that the question of peace was a ques-
tion of terms; that every country desired peace at
the earliest possible moment, that peace could be
had on terms satisfactory to itself. The plan sug-
gested an International Commission of Experts
to sit as long as the war continued, with scientific
but no diplomatic function; such a commission
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 its be-
half, and we deliberately made the immediate

BEGINNING OF THE GREAT WAR 9

calling of a Conference of Neutrals the first plank
in our new platform.

The officers of the newly formed society were :
Mrs. Anna Garlin Spencer and Mrs. Henry Vil-
lard 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 estab-
lished, were Mrs. Harriet Thomas as execu-
tive 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 plat-
form, the Conference of Neutrals, seemed so im-
portant and withal so reasonable, that our officers
in the month following the founding of the or-
ganization, with Louis Lochner, secretary of the
Chicago Peace Society, issued a call to every public
organization in the United States whose constitu-
tion, so far as we could discover, contained a plank
setting forth the obligations of internationalism.
These organizations of course included hundreds
of mutual benefit societies, of trade unions and so-
cialist 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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

Peace Forces. A very interesting group re-
sponded to the invitation, and the Conference,
resulting in the formation of the proposed
Federation, also held large mass meetings urging
the call of a Conference of Neutrals.

The Women's Peace Party, during the first few
months of its existence, grew rapidly, with flour-
ishing branches in California and in Minnesota,
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
Street, 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 shorten-
ing of the war. A number of the leading or-
ganizations of women became affiliated branches
of the Women's Peace Party. Women every-
where 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.

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

BEGINNING OF THE GREAT WAR 11

an international public should become so familiar
that an effective demand for its fulfillment could
be made at the end of the war. This latter un-
dertaking 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 Inter-
national Friendship Among the Churches" also
was active and maintained its own representative
in Europe. As a neutral, he at that time was able
to 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.
His successor, George Nasmyth, was also a
sturdy friend of ours, and we keenly felt the
tragedy of his death at Geneva, in 1920.

Through the very early spring of 1915, out of
our eagerness, we tried all sorts of new methods
of propaganda, new at least so far as peace so-
cieties were concerned. A poem which had ap-
peared in the London Nation portraying the be-
wilderment of humble Belgians and Germans sent
suddenly to arms, was set to Beethoven's music
and, through the efforts of the Women's Peace
Party, sung in many towns and cities in the
United States by the Fuller sisters, three young

12 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

English women, whose voices were most appeal-
ing. The Carnegie Endowment for International
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 a
solemn mood as the age-old plaint of war-weary
women 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."

In March, 1915, we received an invitation
signed by Dutch, British and Belgian women to
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 all nations would join. I had pre-
viously met several of the signers at the Interna-
tional Suffrage Conference and elsewhere. I
knew them to be women of great courage and
ability, and I had long warmly admired Dr. Al-
letta Jacobs of Amsterdam, whose name led the
list.

A delegation of forty-seven women from the

BEGINNING OF THE GREAT 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 Hol-
land in the middle of April, on the Dutch ship
Noordam, in which we were almost the only pas-
sengers. 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, with-
in four 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
Dover, where we faintly heard booming of can-
non, and saw air and marine craft of every con-
ceivable make and kind. The first English news-
papers which came on board informed us of the
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 be-
came only too familiar. During the three days
the ship hung at anchor there was much tele-
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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

finally received permission to proceed on her way
and we landed in Rotterdam two hours before the
opening of the Congress. We from the United
States were more fortunate than the English del-
egation. The North Sea had been declared
closed to all traffic the very day they were to start,
and eighty-seven of them waited at a port during
the entire session of The Hague Congress, first
for boats and later for flying machines, neither of
which ever came. Fortunately three English-
women had 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 suffra-
gists and believers in the settlement of interna-
tional disputes by pacific means. Belligerent as
well as neutral nations were represented, with
sometimes two thousand visitors in attendance, all
of whom had paid an entrance fee but were not al-
lowed to participate in the deliberations. The
sessions were characterized by efficiency and
scrupulous courtesy, not without a touch of dig-
nity, as became the solemn theme. All discussion
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 police, who filled the galleries at
the first meetings, were withdrawn as it became

BEGINNING OF THE GREAT WAR 15

evident that there 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 with the German delegation be-
fore they took their places beside them on the
platform, dedicated to "a passionate human sym-
pathy, not inconsistent with patriotism, but tran-
scending it." All the women from the belligerent
countries in leaving home to attend the Congress
had dared ridicule and every sort of difficulty;
they had also met the supreme test of a woman's
conscience — of differing with those whom she
loves in the hour of their deepest affliction. For
men in the heat of war were at the best sceptical
of the value of the Congress and many of them
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. A
committee, consisting of two women from each
country, called "The Women's International Com-
mittee for Permanent Peace," was organized and
established headquarters at Amsterdam.

At its last session, the Congress voted that its
resolutions, especially the one on a Conference of
Neutrals, should be carried by a delegation of

16 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

women from the neutral countries to the Premier
and Minister of Foreign Affairs of each of the
belligerent countries, and by a delegation of
women from the belligerent countries to the same
officials in the neutral nations. As a result four-
teen countries were visited in May and June,
1915, by delegates from the Congress.

As women, it was possible for us, from belliger-
ent and neutral nations alike, to carry forward an
interchange of question and answer between
capitals which were barred to each other. Every-
where, 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
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 Wilhelm-
strasse, in Vienna as -in Petrograd, in Budapest as
in Havre, where the Belgians had their tem-
porary government. "My country would not
find anything unfriendly in such action by the neu~

BEGINNING OF THE GREAT 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 its institution," said the Minister of an oppos-
ing nation. "What are the neutrals waiting
for?" said a third.

Our confidence as to the feasibility of the plan
for a Conference of Neutrals also increased.
"You 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, 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.

The envoys were received by the following
representatives of the belligerent nations:

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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

Foreign Minister Sasonoff, in Petrograd.

And by the following representatives of neu-
tral governments:

Prime Minister Cort van der Linden and For-
eign Minister Loudon, in The Hague.

Prime Minister Zahle and Foreign Minister
Scavenius, in Copenhagen.

King Haakon, Prime Minister Knudsen, For-
eign Minister Ihlen, and by Messrs. Loevland,
Asrstad Castberg and Jahren, the four presidents
of the Storthing in Christiania.

Foreign Minister Wallenberg, in Stockholm.

President Motta and Foreign Minister Hoff-
man, in Berne.

President Wilson and Secretary of State Lan-
sing in Washington.

While in Rome, the delegation went unofficially
— that is to say, without a mandate from the Con-
gress, to an audience with the Pope and the
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
after another, it still seems marvelous to me that
the people we met were so outspoken against war,
with a freedom of expression which was not al-
lowed later in any of the belligerent nations.
Among certain young men, such as those editing
the Cam-Magazine in Cambridge University,
there was a veritable revolt against war and

BEGINNING OF THE GREAT WAR 19

against the old men responsible for it who, they
said, were "having field days on their own," in
appealing to hate, intolerance and revenge with-
out fear of contradiction from the younger gener-
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
United States, and we issued what we called a
manifesto, urging once more the calling of a Neu-
tral Conference and giving our reasons therefor.
This document is long since forgotten, lost in the
stirring events which followed, although at the

20 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

time it received a good deal of favorable com-
ment, in the press of the neutral countries on
both sides of the Atlantic, perhaps because it was
difficult openly to oppose its modest recommenda-
tions. We were 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, more than 400 meetings were held
in one day in different parts of the country, calling
on the government to act.

"The excruciating burden of responsibility for
the hopeless continuance of this war no longer
rests on the will of the belligerent nations alone.
It rests also on the will of those neutral govern-
ments and people who have been spared its shock
but cannot, if they would, absolve themselves from
their full share of responsibility for the continu-
ance 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-

BEGINNING OF THE GREAT WAR 21

ing a section of the Women's International Com-
mittee for Permanent Peace we were securely
committed to an international body which at that
time had well defined branches in fifteen countries.

The Congressional program adopted at the an-
nual meeting included measures to oppose uni-
versal, compulsory, military service; to secure a
joint commission to deal with problems arising be-
tween the United States and the Orient; and to
formulate the principle that foreign investments
shall be 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 a conference on Oppressed and Dependent
Nationalities, arranged by Miss Grace Abbott,
one of our members, who had had long experience
as Superintendent of the Immigrant Protective
League of Chicago.

The invitations to this special conference called
attention to the fact that as 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 self-
government in a country great in territory or com-
plex in population. How America's international
policies might support or express these principles
was the problem before the conference. It was
believed that valuable advice could be given by

22 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

those citizens of the United States who by their
birth belonged to the dependent or oppressed na-
tionalities and who, through their American "ex-
perience, were familiar with the workings of our
federal form of government.

Prominent representatives of the Poles, Czecho-
slovaks, Lithuanians and Letts, Ukrainians, Jugo-
slavs, Albanians, Armenians, Zionists and Irish
Republicans were, for this reason, the speakers
at the Conference. All the problems of conflict-
ing claims and the creation of new subject minor-
ities as a result of any territorial changes which
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 con-
trast 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. Pro-
fessor Masaryk, later President of Czecho-Slo-
vakia, attempted to accomplish such an end in the
organization of the Central European nationali-
ties, which actually came to a tentative agreement
in Philadelphia more than a year later.

Had the federal form of government taken
hold of the minds of the American representatives

BEGINNING OF THE GREAT WAR 23

of various nationalities as strongly as did the de-
sire for self-determination, or had the latter been
coupled with an enthusiasm for federation, many
of the difficulties inherent in the Peace Conference
would have been anticipated. A federation
among the succession states of Austria would have
secured at the minimum a Customs Union and
might have averted the most galling economic diffi-
culties.

It was at this third annual meeting in Washing-
ton, the last held 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 other sympathetic citizens of the United
States, had been at times horribly oppressed with
the 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 mind with a sense of well being. One re-
called Serbia, where three-fourths of a million
people out of the total population of three million,
had perished miserably of typhus and other dis-
eases 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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

ror of all, the "Way of the Cross" — so called by
the Russians because it was easily traced by the
continuous crosses raised over the hastily dug
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 be-
came commonplace statements on hundreds of
platforms, that although there had been universal
bad harvests in 1916, the war itself was primari-
ly 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 in definite war industries, such as ship-
building. Of course, not all 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 agri-
culture and in industry.

The European fields, worked by women and
children and in certain sections by war prisoners,
were lacking in fertilizers which could not be
brought from remote ports nor be manufactured

BEGINNING OF THE GREAT WAR 25

as usual in Europe, because nitrates and other such
materials essential to ammunition were being di-
verted to that use. The U-boats constantly de-
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.

Mr. Hoover, at the head of the American Re-
lief Committee, was then feeding approximately
10,000,000 people in Belgium and northern
France, but at that time little more was attempted
in the feeding of civilian populations. Yet
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 SHIP.

IN the fall of 1915, after we had written our
so-called "Manifesto," a meeting of the Woman's
Peace Party was called in New York City, at
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 partici-
pate 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 Cen-
tral Powers had at that moment the technical
military advantage, such a conference, if convened

at all, should not be summoned until the military

26

THE NEUTRAL CONFERENCE 27

situation was more balanced. We thought that
we had adequately replied to both of these ob-
jections, but because of them or for other reasons
President Wilson would not consider the proposi-
tion, 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 con-
ference if it could be assured of the participation
of the United States.

We seemed to have come to an impasse there-
fore, so far as calling a conference of neutrals was
concerned unless 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
might make the effort appear absurd. We made
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
$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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

the slaughter in Europe. These women's organ-
izations included mutual benefit societies, all
sorts of Church organizations, women's clubs and
many others. The telegrams we sent averaged
in cost $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 thou-
sand more than the number of our requests; they
poured in at such a rate for three days that the
office in Washington was obliged to engage 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 blood-
shed.

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 Ro-
sika 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 rep-
resentative in Washington to keep him informed
of possible openings for making peace with the
understanding that such efforts "should not be

THE NEUTRAL CONFERENCE 29

mere talk nor education." During a long inter-
view 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 con-
ference of the Women's Peace Party adjourned
and he met with a small committee the same eve-
ning. Up to that moment all our efforts had
been bent towards securing a conference supported
by neutral governments who should send repre-
sentatives 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 ini-
tiate it as a private enterprise.

It is easy to forget the state of the public mind
at the end of the first year of the great war. At
that moment much was said in regard to the un-
willingness of both sides to "dig in" for another
winter of trench warfare, and a statement was
constantly repeated that, on the western front
alone during an average day when no military posi-
tion had been changed, the loss was still three
thousand men. We knew how concerned the re-
sponsible 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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

try after another, was steadily being outraged.
The first Christmas of the war the Pope had
made a touching, although futile appeal for a
cessation of hostilities; it might be possible that
as the second Christmas approached, men's minds
would be open to a proposition looking towards
the gradual substitution of adjudication for mili-
tary methods. It is very difficult after five years
of war to recall the attitude of most normal peo-
ple during those first years. Such people had not
yet acknowledged the necessity and propriety of
war, their mental processes were not yet so in-
hibited but that many of them still believed that
it might be possible to clarify the atmosphere, and
to find a way out of the desperate situation in
which Europe found itself. At least the begin-
nings 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 continu-
ously would take up one possibility after another
for beginning peace negotiations. It was further
hoped by the most sanguine that such a confer-
ence, 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 allied side would turn over
to it the German colonies in South Africa, the
Central Powers such parts of Belgium and North-

THE NEUTRAL CONFERENCE 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 man-
dates. It would be developed into the beginnings
of a de facto international government. It might
bring hope to certain soldiers on both sides of the
conflict who were confessedly fighting on dogged-
ly 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
once more reconstructed; they knew that the
longer the war lasted the harder it would be to
make peace and that each month of war inevitably
tended to involve more nations. They were
amazed at the futile efforts of European states-
men, at their willingness and at moments their
apparent eagerness to hand their functions over
to military men, and at their craven acceptance
as inevitable of much which might conceivably
be changed. Many people went about day after
day with an oppressive sense of the horrible dis-
aster which had befallen the world and woke up
many times during the night as from a hideous
nightmare. Men must have felt like this during
the time of pestilence, in the fourteenth century

32 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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
it. 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 pure-
ly domestic issues. Yet here they were at the be-
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 ma-
chine threatened her very existence. We could
only reply that we were not criticizing France,
that we had every admiration for her gallant cour-
age, but that what we were urging at that mo-
ment was the cessation of hostilities and the sub-
stitution of another method. Was a group of men
living in Prussia, who had urged the development
and perfection of a military machine which, from
the very nature of the case must in the course
of time be put into operation, to be allowed to
determine the future of all the young men in
Europe? Would not the system of conscription,
spread to England and her colonies overseas, but
increase the practice of militarism?

THE NEUTRAL CONFERENCE 33

Our hopes were high that evening in New York
as we talked over the possible men and a few
women from the Scandinavian countries, from
Holland and Switzerland, who possessed the inter-
national mind and might lend themselves to the
plan of a neutral conference. We were quite
worldly enough to see that we should have to be-
gin 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. Mr. Ford took a night train to
Washington to meet an appointment with Presi-
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 noth-
ing 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 quite within his rights in financing a neutral
conference and had wished all success to the enter-
prise.

34 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

The difficulties, 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 com-
mittee meeting evidently knew of this plan, but I
was at once alarmed, insisting that it would be
easy enough for the members of the conference
to travel to Stockholm or The Hague by various
steamship lines, paying their own expenses; that
we needed Mr. Ford's help primarily in organiz-
ing a conference but not in transporting the peo-
ple. Mr. Ford's response was to the effect that
the more publicity the better and that the sailing
of the ship itself would make known the confer-
ence 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 was estab-
lished with its own headquarters in New York.
An attempt the very first day to organize a com-
mittee who should be responsible for selecting the
personnel of the conference proved difficult. Mr.
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 pre-
sented a list of students, limited to two from each
of the leading colleges and universities whom they

THE NEUTRAL CONFERENCE 35

wished to have invited. We pointed out that these
could hardly hope to be of direct value to the
conference itself, but it was hard to set aside the
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. The
youthful advocates also believed that their
demonstration might evoke a compunction among
the elderly statesmen responsible for the war who,
by calling any such remonstrance treason, had ab-
solutely inhibited pacifist youth in Europe from
expression of opinion. There was also much feel-
ing at the moment among certain students in Amer-
ican universities over the suppression in England
of the Cambridge Magazine whose editorial policy
had been consistently anti-military, and over the
fact that Bertrand Russell had been asked to re-
sign from Cambridge University.

A 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 ad-
dressed to honest, devoted, and also distinguished
people, although the offer of a crusading journey
to Europe with all expenses paid could but at-
tract many fanatical and impecunious reformers.

Almost immediately upon my return to Chi-
cago, ten days before the Oscar II sailed, the

36 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

newspaper accounts from New York began to be
most disquieting. We had not expected any ac-
tual cooperation from the newspapers, but mak-
ing 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 slo-
gan "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 regula-
tions, I knew that such propaganda would be con-
sidered 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 un-
toward development the secretary received the
resignations of three leading internationalists
who had seriously considered going, and of two
others who had but recently accepted. They had
all been convinced of the possible usefulness of

THE NEUTRAL CONFERENCE 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 quiet-
istic 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 cher-
ished 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 was the pacifists
who believed that life itself was so glorious an
adventure that the youth of one nation had no
right to deprive the youth of another nation of
their share in it; that living itself, which all youth
had in common, was larger and more inclusive
than the nationalistic differences so unfairly
stressed by their elders.

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

38 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

sible that with Mr. Ford's personal knowledge of
the 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 if the appeal came
simultaneously to both sides. The bulk of the sol-
diers in every army are men who ordinarily work
with their hands in industry, in transportation and
in agriculture. We had been told, only the month
before, of the response on the part of the Eng-
lish 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.
How 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
hands, that they had felt disconnected and un-
happy. Possibly what Mr. Veblen calls "the in-
stinct 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
which Mr. Ford was making more natural and
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

THE NEUTRAL CONFERENCE 39

things which Mr. Ford had gained from his wide
experience was an overwhelming belief in the
value of advertising; even derision was better
than no "story" at all. Partly in pursuance of
this policy, partly because they themselves were
clamorous, no fewer than sixty-four newspaper
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 Scandi-
navian 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 .excep-
tions, a group of very eccentric people had at-
tached themselves to the enterprise, so that there
was every chance for a fiasco, I still felt com-
mitted 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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

undertaking, for after all the actual foundations
of the conference itself would have to be laid on
the other side of the Atlantic. It became clearer
every day that whoever became associated with
the ship would be in for much ridicule and social
opprobrium, but that of course seemed a small
price to pay for a protest against war. Even in
Mr. Ford's much 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
pages of Tolstoy's reaction to the simple Chris-
tian teaching raced through my mind; was this
slogan a slangy 2Oth century version of the same
decisive appeal?

What my interpretation of the enterprise would
have been, had I 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 follow-
ing weeks when the Neutral Conference was ac-
tually established in Stockholm.

It is useless to speculate on what might have
occurred at various times but for our physical limi-
tations; we must, perforce, accommodate our-
selves to them, and it is never easy, although I

THE NEUTRAL CONFERENCE 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 Hol-
land. The entire expedition, so far as she con-
ducted it, was in the grand manner for she be-
lieved, rightly or wrongly, that the drooping Peace
Movement needed the prestige and reassurance
that such a policy would bring to it. Unfortunate-
ly the policy exposed her both to the charge of
extravagance and of having manufactured a
claque.

Difficulties developed during the journey; Mr.
Ford left a few days after the group arrived in
Norway, in the midst of journalistic misrepre-
sentations and Madame Schwimmer resigned
from the Conference, during the early months of
its existence. But in spite of disasters the Neu-
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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

Swedish Government to define its attitude on neu-
tral mediation.

Gradually the personnel was completed by five
representatives each from Denmark, Holland,
Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, with three from
the United States. Among the Europeans were
Professors of International Law, of Economics,
of Philosophy, the legal advisor to the Nobel In-
stitute, men and women who were officers of Na-
tional Peace Societies, members of Parliament and
city officials. They first issued a carefully con-
sidered appeal addressed "To the Governments
and Parliaments of the Neutral Nations repre-
sented at the second Hague Conference" begging
them to offer official mediation, and quoting from
The Hague Conventions to show that such an
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 Parlia-
ments, 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 Peo-
ple of Belligerent Nations." This was the result

THE NEUTRAL CONFERENCE 43

of much study, and was founded upon an intelli-
gent effort to 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
country. He added one more to the tragic peti-
tions, received from all parts of Europe. This
official appeal to the belligerent nations, foreshad-
owing the famous fourteen points, was also widely
published.

The Conference of Neutrals, reorganized into
an International Commission devoted to promot-
ing 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 Den-
mark, wrote a stirring appeal for Peace, as did
the poets and writers of various countries, in-
cluding Ellen Key and Selma Lagerlof. For the
moment a demand for the cessation of the war be-

44 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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 bel-
ligerent 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
enthusiastic report. He arrived in the midst of
the "he kept us out of war" Presidential campaign.
The Democratic Party in 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 dis-
armament, and that the question on everybody's
lips was "how soon will Wilson act?" We were
sure that Mr. Wilson would act in his own best
way, and were most anxious not to take the atti-
tude towards him by which the Abolitionist so
constantly embarrassed President Lincoln during
the Civil War.

Mr. Ford at that time was guaranteeing to the
Conference a steady income of ten thousand dol-
lars a month, the first difficulties had subsided

THE NEUTRAL CONFERENCE 45

and the movement was constantly gaining prestige.
The Norway delegation, for instance, then con-
sisting of Christian Lange, general secretary of
the Interparliamentary Union; Dr. Horgenstierne,
president of the University of Christiania, and
Haakon Loeken, state's attorney for Christiania.
This personnel was not unlike that of the other
countries.

On December 10, 1916, President Wilson is- .
sued 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. Loch-
ner in Chicago, as he reported recent interviews
with Mr. Ford and his secretaries, it was evident
that the benefactor of the Neutral Conference was
reflecting the change in public opinion, and like
many another pacifist, who does not believe in
war as such, was nevertheless making an excep-
tion of "this war." In February Mr. Ford's
changed position was unmistakable. He an-

46 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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 Confer-
ence of Neutrals devoted to continuous mediation.
Our women's organizations as such had had noth-
ing to do with the "Ford Ship," but of course we
had assiduously urged the Conference which it was
designed to serve, and our members in many coun-
tries had promoted the de facto Conference. Cer-
tainly no one could justly charge us with "passiv-
ity" in our efforts to secure it.

During my long days of invalidism in California
the following spring, I had plenty of time to anal-
yze the situation. Had we been over-persistent,
so eager for the grapes that we were willing to
gather thistles, had our identification with the
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-
ment absolutely free from any sensationalism, I
found that the latter had been scarcely more suc-
cessful : The Minimum Program Committee had
been supported by pacifists from many countries.
It was inaugurated in the spring of 1915 at a con-
ference composed of distinguished men and women
held at The Hague, where it established perman-

THE NEUTRAL CONFERENCE 47

ent headquarters. It had put forward a rational
program, and had kept alive the hopes for an or-
dered world, functioning throughout the war and
for two years following with no act of indiscretion.
It was, in fact, so cautious that at a dinner in
New York 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 indi-
cated, asked him to resign. To them, as to so
many millions of their fellow citizens, the slogan
that "this is a war to end war" and the hope that
the Peace Commission would provide for an en-
during peace, were convincing. They did not real-
ize how old the slogan was, nor how many times
it had lured men into 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
who waged the last campaign against Napoleon.
They declared in the grandiloquent phrases they
used so easily that their aims were "the recon-
struction of the moral order," "a regeneration of
the political system of Europe," and "the estab-
lishment of an enduring peace founded upon a just
redistribution of political forces." But Napoleon
was "crushed" and none of their moral hopes were
fulfilled. They too were faced at the end of the

48 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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.

As the Great War incredibly continued year
after year, as the entrance of one nation after an-
other increased the number of young combatants,
as the war propaganda grew ever more bitter and
irrational, there were moments when we were ac-
tually grateful for every kind of effort we had
made. At such times, the consciousness of social
opprobrium, of having become an easy mark for
the cheapest comment, even the sense of frustra-
tion were, I am certain, easier to bear than would
have been the consciousness that in our fear of
sensationalism we had left one stone unturned to
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 neu-
tral 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 con-
flict. If the strategy had succeeded these liberals
would have come into power in all the parliamen-

49

50 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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 in liberal hands. The peace conference it-
self would inevitably have been presided over
by the President of the great neutral nation who
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.

We also counted upon the fact that this great
war had challenged the validity of the existing
status between nations, as it had never been ques-
tioned before, and that radical changes were being
proposed by the most conservative of men every-
where. , As conceived by the pacifist, the construc-
tive task laid upon the United States at that 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 Europe of 1914*
certain 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 sup-
pressed 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 con-
ditions and unsolved problems. Agreeing sub-
stantially with this analysis of the causes of the
war, we pacifists, so far from passively wishing
nothing to be done, contended on the contrary
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
encourage the 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 or elsewhere, there to pass a resolu-
tion that "wars hereby cease" and that "the world
hereby be federated." What we insisted upon

52 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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 asked why the problem of building a railroad
to Bagdad, of securing corridors to the sea for
a land-locked nation, or warm water harbors for
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 ob-
vious that such situations transcended national
boundaries and must be approached in a spirit
of world adjustment, that they could not be peace-
fully 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 inter-
national field, by demonstrating that the same
principles of federation and of an interstate tri-
bunal might be extended among widely separated
nations, as they had already been established be-
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 peace-
ful adjudication as matters of every-day govern-
ment. The President's speech before the Senate

PRESIDENT WILSON'S POLICIES 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 diffi-
cult piece of American strategy.

It was early in January, 1916, that the Presi-
dent 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
political independence and territorial integrity"
was not so significant to us as the second, "to set-
tle all disputes arising between us by investiga-
tion and arbitration."

One of our members had been prominently
identified with this Congress. I had addressed its
Woman's Auxiliary and at our Executive Com-
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 pro-
viding for commissions of inquiry in cases of diffi-
culty. Secretary Bryan had stated at that time
that twenty-six nations had already signed such

54 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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 cus-
toms and finances for twenty years. United
States Marines, however, had occupied Haiti since
a riot which had taken place in 1915 and had set
up a military government, including a strict mili-
tary censorship. All sorts of stories were reach-
ing the office of the Woman's Peace Party, some
of them from white men wearing the United
States' uniform, some of them from black men in
despair over the treatment accorded to the island
by "armed invaders." We made our protest to
Washington, Miss Breckenridge presenting the
protest in person after she had made a most care-
ful investigation into all the records to be found

PRESIDENT WILSON'S POLICIES 55

in the possession of the government. She re-
ceived a most evasive reply having to do with a
naval base which the United States had estab-
lished there in preference to allowing France or
Germany to 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
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 contradic-
tion 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 gov-
ernment.

In the late summer of the same year there came
the purchase of the Virgin Islands from Denmark.
A plebiscite had been taken in Denmark in regard
to this sale but none 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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

that the Virgin Islands people did wish such a
transfer, but there was no reply to our contention
that it would make it all the easier therefore, to
take the vote, and that the situation offered a won-
derful 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
government to another without a formal expres-
sion of their wishes.

In November, 1916, military occupation of the
San Dominican Republic was proclaimed by Cap-
tain Knapp of the United States Navy and a mili-
tary government was established there under con-
trol of the United States. Again we made our
protest but this time as a matter of form, having
little hope of a satisfactory reply although we
were always received with much official courtesy.
We were quite ready to admit that the govern-
ment 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 upon the policy of the United
States in its larger international relationships. We
said to each other and once when the occasion of-

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 carry-
ing 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
do. It seemed to us at moments as if the Presi-
dent were imprisoned in his own spacious intel-
lectuality, and had forgotten the overwhelming
value of the deed.

Up to the moment of his nomination for a sec-
ond term our hopes had gradually shifted to the
belief that the President 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 cam-
paigning 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 posi-
tion through many spirited talks with Progressive
friends who felt that our mutual hopes could be
best} secured through other 'parties, and as I

58 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

grew better, and was able to undertake a mini-
mum of speaking and writing, it was all for Presi-
dent Wilson's reelection and for an organization
of a League of Nations. My feeble efforts were
recognized beyond their desert when, after the
successful issue in November I was invited to a
White House dinner tendered to a few people who
had been the President's steadfast friends.

The results of the campaign had been very
gratifying to the members of our group. It
seemed at last as if peace were assured and the
future safe in the hands of a chief executive who
had received an unequivocal mandate from the
people "to keep us out of war." We were, to be
sure, at moments a little uneasy in regard to his
theory of self-government, a theory which had re-
appeared in his campaign speeches and was so
similar to that found in his earlier books. It
seemed at those times as if he were not so eager
for a mandate to carry out the will of the peo-
ple as for an opportunity to lead the people
whither in his 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
only enormously reassured but were sent up into
the very heaven of internationalism, as it were,
when President Wilson delivered his famous
speech to the Senate in January, 1917, which

PRESIDENT WILSON'S POLICIES 59

forecast his fourteen points. 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
for Democratic Control in England and later
became known as a "union" program. Our Wom-
an's International Congress held at The Hague
in May, 1915, had incorporated most of the Eng-
lish formula and had added others. The Presi-
dent 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
seen up to that time.

President Wilson, however, later not only gath-
ered together the best liberal statements yet made,
formulated them in his incomparable English and
added others of his own, but he was the first re-
sponsible statesman to enunciate them as an ac-
tual 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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

sonable human relationships were once more pub-
licly recognized as valid in international affairs.

If, after the declaration of his foreign policy,
it seemed to our group that desire and achieve-
ment were united in one able protagonist, the phil-
osopher become king, so to speak^ this state of
mind was destined to be short lived, for almost
immediately the persistent tendency of the Presi-
dent to divorce his theory from the actual conduct
of state affairs threw us into a state of absolute
bewilderment. During a speaking tour in Janu-
ary, 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
navy in the world.

We were in despair a few weeks later when
in 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
States should enter the 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

United States should take to enter into a world
situation. The crisis, it seemed to us, offered a
test of the vigor and originality of a nation whose
very foundations were laid upon a willingness to
experiment.

It was at this time that another disconcerting
factor in the situation made itself felt; a factor
which was brilliantly analyzed in Randolph
Bourne's article entitled "War and the Intellec-
tuals." The article was a protest against the
"unanimity with which the American intellectuals
had thrown their support to the use of war tech-
nique in the crisis in which America found her-
self," and against "the riveting of the war mind
upon a hundred million more of the world's peo-
ple." It seemed as if certain intellectuals, editors,
professors, clergymen, were energetically pushing
forward the war against the hesitation and dim
perception of the mass of the p§ople. They
seemed actually to believe that " a war free from
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 coun-
try into war. The long established peace societies
and their 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 experi-

62 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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 a 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 re-
construction of the world after the war as the
aim of American diplomacy and endeavor. Cer-
tainly his pacifist friends had every right to be-
lieve 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 de-
claration of war presented to Congress on April
2nd. A well known English economist has re-
cently written : "The record shows Mr. Wilson up
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' maxim was repeated after the Lusi-
tania incident. There is no evidence that the peo-
ple who had elected him in the previous fall be-
cause he had 'kept us out' wanted to go in

PRESIDENT WILSON'S POLICIES 63

until Mr. Wilson made them want. Why did he ?
What was the rapid conversion which it is com-
monly supposed Mr. Wilson underwent in the
winter of 1916-1917?"

The pacifists were not idle during these days.
A meeting of all the leading peace societies was
called in New York in March and a committee of
five, of which two were members of the Woman's
Peace Party, was appointed to wait upon the Presi-
dent 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
other American presidents had done through
adjudication when the interests of American
shipping had become involved during European
wars; notably, George Washington during the
French Revolution and John Adams in the
Napoleonic War, so that international adjudica-
tion instituted by Chief Justice Jay became known
in Europe as "the American plan." The Presi-
dent 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
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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

clared, and we once more pressed for a con-
ference of neutrals. Other suggestions were pre-
sented by a committee from the Union Against
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 German machina-
tions in Mexico and announced the impossibility
of any form of adjudication. He still spoke to us,
however, as to fellow pacifists to whom he was
forced to confess that 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,
as 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
representative of a neutral country he could at best
only "call through a crack in the door." The ap-
peal 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 de-
fend them, but not otherwise. It was as if his
heart's desire spoke through his words and dic-
tated his view of the situation. But I found my
mind challenging his whole theory of leadership.
Was it a result of my bitter disappointment that I
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 discredit-
ing of the Carlyle contention that the people must
be led into the ways of righteousness by the ex-
perience, acumen and virtues of the great man.
It 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
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
out the people's desires. He certainly did not
dig the channels through which their purposes
might flow and his own purpose be obtained be-
cause it had become one with theirs. It seemed
to me quite obvious that the processes of war
would destroy more democratic institutions than
he could ever rebuild however much he might de-
clare 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?

Some of us felt that this genuine desire on the

66 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

part of the President, to be in a position to do
great good was perhaps the crux of the difficulty
later when he 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
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 upon it as the inevitable basis for negotia-
tions between two sides, the foundation of a
"peace between equals."

Were the difficulties of the great compromise
inherent in the situation, and would they still have
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 in such an atmosphere and some of
the mistakes would have been averted. Twenty-
six governments of the world stood convicted of
their own impotence to preserve life and property,
they were directly responsible for the loss of ten
million men in military service, as many more peo-
ple through the disease and desolation following
war, for the destruction of untold accumulations
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

PRESIDENT WILSON'S POLICIES 67

might have happened if President Wilson could
have said in January, 1919, what he had said in
January, 1917, — "A victor's terms imposed upon
the vanquished . . . would leave a sting, a resent-
ment, 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 territory, or of racial and na-
tional allegiance." 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
all but destroyed her civilization. A man who had
stood firmly against participation in war could
have had his way with the common people in
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
League of Nations fail to win their hearts not be-
cause it was too idealistic or too pacifistic but
because it permitted war in too many instances, be-
cause its very structure and functioning is per-
vaded by the war spirit, the victorious disciplin-

68 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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?

General Smuts has said that the Paris Peace
in destroying the moral idealism born of the sacri-
fices of the war, did almost as much as the war
itself to shatter the structure of western civiliza-
tion. But the disastrous Peace came about, to
quote the words of General Smuts himself, be-
cause "in the end not only the leaders but the
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 re-
sources— to all the faint allurements of an ideal."
It was indeed the human spirit itself which failed,
but the human spirit under a temptation which an
earlier peace might have diminished. An impar-
tial 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
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 indi-
cated that ability to play the two are seldom com-

PRESIDENT WILSON'S POLICIES 69

bined in the same person? The power to make
the statement, to idealize a given situation, to for-
mulate the principle, is a gift of the highest sort,
but it assumes with intellectual power a certain
ability of philosophic detachment; in one sense
it implies the spectator rather than the doer. A
man who has thus formulated a situation must
have a sense of achievement, of having done what
he is best fitted to do ; he has made his contri-
bution and it is almost inevitable that he should
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-
tainly international affairs have been profoundly
modified by President Wilson's magnificent contri-
bution. From one aspect of the situation he did
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 war by simply turning on the light. But
the man who would successfully insist upon such
a course of procedure in actual negotiations is not
only he who sees the situation but he who is bent
upon the attainment of a beloved object, whose
cause has become his heart's desire. Nothing can
ever destroy the effect of the public utterance of

70 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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
fact, the accomplishment of his dictum, although
he must inevitably encounter the disappointment
of those who believed it to imply an open discus-
sion of the terms of the Peace Treaty, which to
his mind was an impossibility. Such an interpreta-
tion may explain the paradox that the author of
the fourteen points returned from Paris, claiming
that he had achieved them.

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 respon-
sible for the policies recommended. Our small
group was much disturbed as were other Ameri-
can 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.

We proposed at our fourth annual meeting that
a beginning be made by the Allies to form an Ex-
ecutive Council not only for political action at the
present but for the future as well. We suggested
that Great Britain, France and the U. S. A. each
appoint three delegates to an Allied Political
Council; that Italy and Japan each appoint two

PRESIDENT WILSON'S POLICIES 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 capa-
city. We hoped that it could assume as much posi-
tive authority as the Versailles Military Council
was at that moment exercising, not only in mili-
tary matters but ultimately in civil affairs as well.
Some such policy did later of course develop,
through the Supreme Economic Council, although
a travesty of what we had hoped for.

As pacifists were in a certain sense outlaws dur-
ing the war, our group was no longer in direct
communication with the White House, which
was of course to be expected, although curiously
enough we 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
a contempt for pacifists because "I, too, want
peace, but I know how to get it, and they do not."
We quite agreed with him that he knew how if he
meant to secure peace through a League of Na-
tions, but we could not understand how he hoped
to do it through war.

I heard President Wilson speak in New York
in Carnegie Hall in February, 1919, just before
he returned to Europe for the continuance of the

72 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

Peace Conference, where he stressed the fact that
the treaty and the 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, there-
fore, must the League depend upon the treaty?
How 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
sanctuary ?

CHAPTER IV

A REVIEW OF BREAD RATIONS AND WOMAN'S
TRADITIONS

As the European war continued and new relief
organizations developed for the care of the
wounded and orphaned, the members of our group
felt increasingly the need for the anodyne of work,
although it was difficult to find our places. For
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 com-
bination made it not only more difficult for pacifists
to become identified with the Red Cross, but all
war activities which were dependent upon public
funds became very timid in regard to pacifist co-
operation. This was, of course, quite natural as
the newspapers constantly coupled the words
traitor 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 fear of imperiling a good cause by having a
pacifist identified with it, that resulted in indi-

73

74 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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, we frankly recognized the instinct for prac-
tical politics as responsible for certain incidents;
at 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-
cutions which came the other way around; when
enthusiastic and fanatical pacifists openly chal-
lenged the honesty and integrity of their former
associates who had become convinced of the ne-
cessity for the war.

With many other Americans I, therefore, ex-
perienced a great sense of relief when Congress
finally established a Department of Food Ad-
ministration 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 first appeal to his fellow country-
men in the name of the food shortage of the en-
tire world, insisting that "the situation is more
than war, it is a problem of humanity."

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 per-
mitted to work without challenge. The latter

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-
tions were under the auspices of the Federal De-
partment of Food Administration, and in Califor-
nia, 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 organiza-
tions, because I not only believed, as I 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 be-
lieved 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 fight-
ing and in the race history the tribal feeding of
children antedated mass fighting by perhaps a mil-
lion 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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

lective fighting of numbers of men against other
masses of men. 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
within himself represented something of both
strains: I used to remind myself that although
I had had ancestors who fought in all the Ameri-
can wars since 1684, I was also the daughter,
granddaughter and the great granddaughter of
millers. My earliest recollection was of being
held up in a pair of dusty hands to see the heavy
stone mill wheels go round. The happiest occu-
pation of my childhood was to watch the old
foaming water wheel turning in the back of the
mill. I could tell by the sound of the mill when
the old wheel was used, which occurred occasion-
ally long after the turbines were established.
Watching the foaming water my childish mind fol-
lowed 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. Cer-
tainly drilling soldiers and the constant review-
ing 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

A REVIEW OF BREAD RATIONS 77

a large part of the work connected with the grow-
ing and preparation of foods. I recalled them
everywhere in the fields of vast Russia as in the
tiny pastures of Switzerland; by every roadside in
Palestine they were grinding at the hand mills;
in Egypt they were forever carrying the water of
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
desire to uncover it, to make clear woman's tradi-
tional activity with something of its poetry and
significance, I read endlessly in Fraser's "Golden
Bough," two large volumes of which are given
over to the history and interpretation of the in-
numerable 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.

At the risk of breaking into the narrative of
this book, so far as there is one, I am venturing
to repeat some of the material which brought a
touch of comfort to me and which, so far as I

78 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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
tribes of 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
song in the 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 re-
searches have later verified and developed. Stu-
dents of primitive society believe that women were
the first agriculturists and were for a long time
the only inventors and developers of its processes.
The men of the tribe did little for cultivating the
soil beyond clearing the space and sometimes sur-
rounding it by a rough protection. The woman
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

A REVIEW OF BREAD RATIONS 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 tribe, if the former
fails to provide her with a garden and a hoe.

It is said that every widespread myth has its
counterpart in the world of morals. This is cer-
tainly true of the "fostering Mother." Students
in the origin of social customs contend that the
gradual change from the wasteful manner of no-
madic life to a settled and much more economic
mode of existence may be fairly attributed to these
primitive agricultural women. Mothers in order
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 insist that they could not possibly
go until their tiny crops were garnered; and that
if the tribe were induced to remain in the same
caves or huts until after harvest the women might
even timidly hope that they could use the same
fields next year, and thus avert the loss of their
children, sure to result from the alternation of
gorging when the hunt was good and of starv-

8o PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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 origin-
ated.

With such a historic background, it seemed to
me that women might, in response to the 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,
to play a conscious part in its progress. The diffi-
culty has always been in attaching our vague pur-
poses 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 with-
out woman's participation founded upon an intel-
ligent understanding and upon the widest sym-
pathy, at the same time the demand could be met

A REVIEW OF BREAD RATIONS 81

only if it were attached to her domestic routine,
its very success depending upon a conscious change
and modification of her daily habits.

It was no slight undertaking to make this syn-
thesis, it afforded probably the most compelling
challenge which has been made upon woman's con-
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 af-
fairs 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 com-
munity "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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

animosities and bring back into it a gregarious
instinct older and more human that the motives
responsible for war. I 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 con-
cern for feeding her children had made the begin-
nings of an orderly domestic life. We are told
that when the crops of grain and roots so pains-
takingly produced by primitive women began to
have a commercial value their production and ex-
change were taken over by the men, as men later
turned the manufacturing of pottery and other of
woman's early industries into profit making activi-
ties. Such a history, suggested that this situa-
tion might be woman's opportunity if only be-
cause foods were, during the war, no longer con-
sidered primarily in regard to their money-mak-
ing value but from the point of view of their hu-
man use. Because the production of food was,
for the moment, dependent upon earlier motives,
it 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.

As I 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

A REVIEW OF BREAD RATIONS 83

into a great 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
utility. Up to the present moment the nations, in
their foreign policies, have conspicuously lacked
that humane quality which has come in their do-
mestic policies through the increasing care for the
poor, and the protection of children. These have
been responsible for all sorts of ameliorative legis-
lation during the later years, in one nation after
another. In their relations to each other, how-
ever, nations have been without 'such motives of
humanitarian action until the Allied nations, dur-
ing the war, evolved a strikingly new foreign
policy in their efforts to relieve the starvation and
distress throughout widespread areas.

There are such unexpected turnings in the paths
of moral evolution that it 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 na-
tions 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 fu-
ture have to be reckoned with as a factor in inter-
national affairs.

84 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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 com-
mercial motive. When it was commercially valu-
able 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 mo-
ment, however, the Allied Nations were collecting
and conserving a common food supply and each na-
tion was facing the necessity of making certain
concessions to the common good that the threat
of famine for all might be averted. A new in-
ternationalism 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
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
said : "The wheat loaf has ascended in the imag-
ination of enormous populations as the positive
symbol of national survival." It seemed as if the
age-long lack of organization between the na-
tions, the dearth of human relationships in world
politics, was about to be corrected, because an

A REVIEW OF BREAD RATIONS 85

unspeakable disaster had forced the nations to
consider together the primitive questions of fam-
ine and pestilence. It was possible that a new
international ethic was arising from these humble
beginnings, as the defense and feeding of the de-
pendent members of the tribe had laid the founda-
tions of tribal loyalty and of national existence
itself. In spite of the great mass of social data
accumulated in the last century, in spite of wide-
spread intellectual training, there has been no suc-
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.
It seemed, therefore, a great historic achieve-
ment that there should have been devised a work-
able method for the collective purchase of food,
to prohibit profiteering in "the precious stuff that
men live by," even for the duration of the war.
We had all been much impressed by the methods
of food distribution in Belgium. Fifteen million
dollars each month were lent to that unhappy na-
tion by the United States, which had taken over
the responsibility of feeding her beleaguered
population. This amount was spent in the United
States for food and its value was carefully con-
sidered by the Division of Research in Nutritive

86 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

Value in the Department of Food Administration.
This Division undertook to know, as well as sci-
ence could tell, what were the necessary daily ra-
tions to maintain health and strength in the sev-
eral 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 adminis-
trative world represented by governmental officials
was then seriously considering the production of
food and the feeding of human beings in the light
of pure science.

As a result, the political relations at least be-
tween Belgium and her Allies had completely
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, largely from the charity
of the world, has been the daily bread of ten mil-
lion human beings in Belgium and Northern
France. To those who doled out this scant al-
lowance, wheat became indelibly the precious sym-
bol 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 econ-
omy of human labor the largest amount of food

A REVIEW OF BREAD RATIONS 87

and of distributing that food to the points of
greatest need, they had been forced to make in-
ternational arrangements for its distribution, ex-
actly 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 sol-
diers and the munition makers who were directly
concerned in the tragic business of "winning the
war," had also become responsible for feeding its
entire civilian population. The appointment of
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. The British
government, in the winter of 1916, when we were
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 same course in order to avert starva-
tion. Commercial competition had been sup-
pressed, not in response to any theory, but be-
cause 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 mili-
tary purposes. There had grown up an enormous

88 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

consolidation of buying for a hundred and twenty
million European people — a phenomenon never
before witnessed in the economic history of the
world.

With this accomplishment, it seemed reasonable
to hope for world order in other directions as well.
Certainly some of the obstructions were giving
way. An English economist had said in 1917:
"The war has, so far, in Europe generally, 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 becom-
ing clear that nations cannot oppose their political
frontiers as an obstacle to free labor and exchange
without suffering themselves and causing suffer-
ing; that the world was faced with a choice be-
tween freedom in international commerce or in-
ternational conflicts of increasing severity. Under
this new standard of measurement, preferential
tariffs would inevitably disappear because the na-
tion denied the open door must suffer in its food
supplies ; the control of strategic waterways or in-
terstate 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-

A REVIEW OF BREAD RATIONS 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 Mesopo-
tamia would depend, not upon the ambition of
rival nations, but upon the world's need of the
food which could again be secured from the ca-
pacious 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 ac-
cess to sea-going ships is so necessary to a nation's
food and because one of the principal causes of
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, per-
sonally, came to believe it possible that the more
sophisticated questions of national grouping
and territorial control would gradually adjust
themselves if the paramount human question of
food for the hungry were fearlessly and drastically
treated upon an international basis. I ventured
further, that the League of Nations, upon which
the whole world, led by President Wilson, was
fastening its hopes, might be founded not upon

90 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

broken bits of international law, but upon min-
istrations to primitive human needs.

Much had been said during the war about primi-
tive emotion and instinctive action, but certainly
their use need not be reserved to purposes of de-
struction. After all, the first friendly communi-
cation between tribe and tribe came through the
need of food when one or the other was starving
and too weak to fight; primitive human compas-
sion made the folkway which afterward developed
into political relationships. I dared to believe
that this early human instinct to come together in
order to avert widespread starvation could not be
forever thwarted by appeals to such later sepa-
ratist instincts as nationalism and therefore urged
that the gates be opened and that these primitive
emotions be allowed to flood our devastated
world. By all means let the beneficent tide be
(directed and canalized by the proposed League of
Nations which was, after all, the outgrowth of
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
the astounding news came of the Russian Revolu-
tion. Perhaps it was because this peasant revolu-
tion reminded me of Bondereff's "Bread Labour,"
a sincere statement of the aspirations of the
Russian peasants, that the events during the first
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 fol-
lowed the Russian Revolution of March 1917,
make it difficult to recall our first impressions of
the most astounding phenomenon in this astound-
ing world as the two thousand miles of Russian
soldiers along the Eastern Front in the days fol-
lowing the abdication of the Czar talked end-
lessly to their enemy brothers in the opposing
trenches.

During their long conversation the Russian
peasant soldiers were telling the East Prussian

92 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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 de-
pends not upon garrisons and tax gatherers but
upon his willingness to perform "bread labor" on
his recovered soil, 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 over-
whelming eagerness to get back to the land which
they believed was at last to be given those who
actually tilled it. They doubtless said that the
peasants had long been holding themselves in
readiness for the great revolution which would
set men free from brutal oppression. They be-
lieved 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
iniquity as the Russian people. Their absorption
in the revolution and their inveterate land hunger
caused many Russian peasants to regard the world
war itself as a mere interruption to the fulfillment
of their supreme obligation.

It was certainly the wisdom of the humble, the

A SPECULATION ON BREAD LABOR 93

very counsel of imperfection, which was exempli-
fied by this army of tattered men, walking so
naively in the dawning light. But they may have
been "the unhindered and adventuring sons of
God," as they renounced warfare in favor of their
old right to labor in the ground. Some of them
in the earliest days of the revolution made a pil-
grimage 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
of the food supply, because he well knows that
when 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. The last, still vivid in the
memory of men at the front, affected thirty
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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

Russian soldiers, never adequately equipped with
ammunition, food and clothing, were reduced
to the last extremity. To go back to his village,
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,
he would find bread. Prince Kropotkin in his
"Conquest of Bread" — written nearly twenty
years ago — predicted that so soon as The Revolu-
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
to cover it." But he adds : "There will be an in-
crease of 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
to the soldier still 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."

A SPECULATION ON BREAD LABOR 95

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

"And when I drove the clods apart
Christ would be plowing in 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 a Norwegian :

"The sower walked bare-headed in Jesu's name.
Every cast was made with care in a spirit of kindly
resignation; so it is throughout all the world
where corn is sown. . . . little showers of grain
flung at famine from the sower's hand."

Certainly tilling the soil, living a life of mutual
labor has been at the bottom of many religious
orders and mystic social experiments. From this
point of view, Tolstoy had rejoiced that groups of

96 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

Russian peasants had never owned land but had
worked it always with the needs of the whole vil-
lage in mind, thus keeping close to Christian teach-
ing and to a life of piety.

That this instinct of bread labor, the very an-
tithesis of war, is wide-spread may be easily de-
monstrated. A 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
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 prison-
ers 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
ground irrespective of its national or individual
ownership.

I recall an evening years ago when I sat in the
garden at Yasnaya Polyana, that Tolstoy begged

A SPECULATION ON BREAD LABOR 97

us to remember that the Russian peasant did not
change his nature when he shed his blouse and put
on the Czar's coat. Tolstoy predicted that the
Russian peasants in thjir permanent patience,
their insatiable hunger for bread labor, may at
last make war impossible to an entire agricultural
people. It is hard to determine whether the Rus-
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
the desire for war.

During the early days of the Russian revolu-
tion it 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
the leading minds of the world. It was in fact
the very desire on the part of the first revolution-
ists in the spring of 1917 to stand aside from
political as well as from military organizations
and to cling only to what they considered the tan-
gible realities of existence, which was most diffi-

98 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

cult for the outside world to understand. The
speculation as I recall it, evolved in my mind some-
what as follows :

The many Allied nations in the midst of a
desperate war, were being held together by cer-
tain formulae of their war aims which had grad-
ually emerged during long years of mutual effort.
Such stirring formulae or statements could be
common to all the diverse Allies, however, only if
they took on the abstract characteristics of gen-
eral principles. This use of the abstract state-
ment, necessary in all political relationships, be-
comes greatly intensified in time of war, as if il-
lustrating the contention that men die willingly
only for a slogan. The question inevitably sug-
gested itself: Had the slogans — this is a war
to end war and a war to safeguard the world for
democracy — become so necessary to united mili-
tary action that the Allies resented the naive at-
tempt on the part of the Russian peasants to
achieve democracy without war? They so firmly
believed that the aims of the 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-

A SPECULATION ON BREAD LABOR 99

selves when they unite in a common purpose re-
quiring for its 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
these myths always accompanies a period of great
moral awakening. Such myths are almost cer-
tain to outlast their social utility, and very often
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 inter-
course, 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 puri-
fication 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 re-
duce it to its human terms !

Vernon Lee contends that it is the essential
characteristic of an historic myth that so long as it
does not attempt to produce its own realization,

ioo PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

it 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
sanctity and heroism. The necessity for con-
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
if the Allies 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
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 cripple the usefulness
of a slogan by acknowledging its partial achieve-
ment?

It was perhaps to be expected that Russia
should be the first nation to apply the touchstone
of reality to a warring world so absorbed in ab-
stractions. If Tolstoy may be considered in any
sense the prototype of his countrymen, it may be

A SPECULATION ON BREAD LABOR 101

permitted to cite his inveterate dislike of ab-
stractions, whether stated in philosophic, patriotic
or religious terms; his firm belief that such ab-
stractions 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 re-
construction, 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
possible reconstructions was actually happening be-
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 Govern-
ments 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 self-
consciousness 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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

new-found hopes. But all 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
speculation. It may be true that the spiritual
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 little moment compared to
the future of civilization which was then imper-
illed by the possibility of a German victory if the
men on 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
peace for all nations.

A SPECULATION ON BREAD LABOR 103

First: the proposals of the Russian Czar, Alex-
ander I, 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 result-
ing 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 Confer-
ence by Nicholas II, in 1899. His broad outline
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 arma-
ments and to the control of the methods of war-
fare.

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 in-
dividual soldiers. The string of Russian soldiers
talking to their recent enemies stretched from the
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 re-
joiced over the failure of the experiment, before
it had really been tried. Certainly the world was

104 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

in no mood just then to listen to "mere talk." It
was resounding with a call to arms.

With our Anglo-Saxon crispness of expression
we are prone to be amused at the Russian's in-
veterate habit of discussion and to quote with tol-
erant 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-
fairs throughout an enormous territory.

When the first detachment of Russian Doukho-
boritsi were settling in Western Canada, they dis-
cussed for two and a half days and two nights the
location of the three villages into which the de-
tachment was divided. One possible site was very
much more desirable than the other two and the
Anglo-Saxon onlooker feared that this factor
alone might indefinitely prolong the difficulty of
decision. But not at all — the discussion came to
a natural end, the matter was settled and never
again reopened nor was the disparity and the de-
sirability of the locations ever again referred to
by anyone concerned. The matter had been satis-
factorily settled in the prolonged discussion by all
the "souls" entitled to participate. It proved
after all to have been a very good way.

We forget that to obtain the "inner consent"
of a man who differs from us is always a slow
process, that quite as it is quicker to punish an un-

A SPECULATION ON BREAD LABOR 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 man than to teach him
the meaning of the law, so it is quicker to fight
armies of men than to convince them one by one.

A curious and very spontaneous manifestation
of good-will towards Russia occurred in Chicago
in the spring of 1918. A society was organized
with the slogan : "Ten Million Pairs of Shoes for
Russia," and ten thousand old shoes were actually
collected and placed in a warehouse. The pro-
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
to work. In response to the objection that even
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 recover. Of course, Anglo-Saxon
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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

lations between the two countries. Throughout
the discussion I sometimes remembered what a
famous British statesman wrote to Charles Sum-
ner in 1862 concerning the cotton spinners of Lan-
cashire who were starving owing to the with-
drawal 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 some-
one in the States had proposed to send something
to our aid. If a few cargoes of flour could come,
say 50,000 barrels, as a gift from persons in your
northern states to the Lancashire workmen, it
would have a prodigious effect in your favor
here."

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 de-
layed 1

CHAPTER VI.

AFTER WAR WAS DECLARED.

THE first meeting of our national Board, con-
vened after the declaration of war, was in Octo-
ber, 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 knowing that we had not been
invited upon a purely social basis.

It 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
conscious. After three days' deliberation the
Board issued a special manifesto to the various
branches, beginning with the statement:

"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 Govern-
ment as to the declaration of war, and all activities
that could be considered as obstructive in respect

107

io8 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

to the conduct of the war, and 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 administra-
tion of food supplies and of other raw materials
and clutched at it with something of the tra-
ditional desperation of the drowning man, the
manifesto ended as follows :

* * * "We recognize that an alliance between
seventeen nations in both hemispheres cannot be
confined to military operations. We rejoice in
the fact that the United States of America has
already taken common action with the Allies in re-
gard to the conservation and distribution of food
supplies and other matters, quite outside the mili-
tary field, which require international cooperation.
We venture to hope that conferences of this type
may be extended until they develop into an inter-
national organization sitting throughout the war.

"An interparliamentary conference thus de-
veloped might from the nucleus of a permanent in-
ternational parliament eventually open to all na-
tions. Such an organization of a World Parlia-
ment, arising in response to actual world needs, is
in line with the genesis and growth of all perma-
nent political institutions."

We could not then realize how very difficult it
would be to make our position clear, and not for a
long time did we sense the control of public opin-

AFTER WAR WAS DECLARED 109

ion and of all propaganda, which is considered nec-
essary for the successful inauguration and conduct
of war. What we were perhaps totally unpre-
pared for as the war continued was the general un-
willingness 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 in-
ternational 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 con-
fuse those faculties which might otherwise find a
solution. There was not only a reluctance to dis-
cuss the very issues for which 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
to give an address before the City Club of Chicago
on "Patriotism and Pacifists in War Time," I
tried quite guilelessly to show that while the posi-
tion of the pacifist in time of war is most difficult,
nevertheless, the modern peace movement, since
it 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
the belligerent nations. Our own Woman's In-
ternational Committee for Permanent Peace had

i io PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

organized branches since the war began in such
fighting nations and colonies as Australia, Austria,
Belgium, Canada, Finland, Germany, Great
Britain, Ireland, Hungary, British India, Italy,
France, Poland and Russia. I ventured to hope
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.

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. We
were not surprised, therefore, when apparently
striking across and reversing this popular con-
ception of patriotism, we should be called traitors
and cowards, but it seemed to us all the more nec-
essary to demonstrate that in our former advo-
cacy we were urging a reasonable and vital alter-
native to war. Only slowly did the pacifist real-
ize that when his fellow countrymen are caught up
by a wave of tremendous enthusiasm and are car-

AFTER WAR WAS DECLARED 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.

Yet in spite of this sober reasoning it was a
distinct shock to me to learn that it had been diffi-
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 would commit them to my pacifist
position. I later lectured on the same subject at
the University of Chicago, trying to be as "sweetly
reasonable" as possible, but only to come out of
the hall profoundly discouraged, having learned
the lesson that during war it is impossible for the
pacifist to obtain an open hearing. Nevertheless,
we 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 some things were
harder to bear than others. We were constantly
accused of wishing to isolate the United States
and to keep our country out of world politics. We
were, of course, urging a policy exactly the reverse,
that this country should lead the nations of the

ii2 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

world into a wider life 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 interna-
tional in character as have the commercial and
social problems so closely connected with them.
It 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
with the rest of the world. Her own experiment
as a republic was quickly followed by France, and
later by Switzerland, and to the south of her a vast
continent contains no nation which fails, through
many vicissitudes, to maintain a republican form
of government. We also hoped to make clear
that it has long been the aim of our own govern-
ment and of similar types throughout the world
to replace coercion by the full consent of the gov-
erned, to educate and strengthen the free will of
the people through the use of democratic institu-
tions; 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
cosmopolitan inhabitants of this great nation
might at last become united in a vast common en-
deavor for social ends. We hoped that this fus-
ing might be accomplished without the sense of

AFTER WAR WAS DECLARED 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 popu-
lation of the United 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 under-
standing and good will, did we but possess the re-
quisite 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 na-
tionalistic position of the old-fashioned sort.
These ties 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 area of internationalism. Then too, the
great war had already demonstrated that modern
warfare is an intimately social and domestic affair.
The civilian suffering and, in certain regions, the

ii4 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

civilian mortality, were as great as that endured
by the soldiers. There were thousands of our fel-
low citizens who could not tear their minds away
from Poland, Galicia, Syria, Armenia, Serbia,
Roumania, Greece, where their own relatives were
dying from diseases superinduced by hardship and
hunger. To such sore and troubled minds war
had come to be a horror which belonged to Europe
alone, and was part of that privation and oppres-
sion which they had left behind them when they
came to America. Newly immigrated Austrian
subjects of a dozen nationalities came to their
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
States did not believe in war — for so the campaign
had been interpreted by many simple minds — and
they had concluded that whatever happened, some
more American way would be found. Pacifists
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-
serving the higher standards of internationalism.
We were not unmindful of the hope for an inter-
national organization to be formed at the end of
the war. But it seemed to us that for thirty-

three months Europe had been earnestly striving
to obtain through patriotic wars, that which could
finally be secured only through international or-
ganization. Millions of men, loyal to one inter-
national alliance, were gallantly fighting millions
of men loyal to another international alliance, be-
cause of Europe's inability to make an alliance in-
cluding them all.

We also realized that ever since the European
war began, the United States had been conscious
of a failure to respond to a moral demand; she
had vaguely 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 diag-
nosis of her case, of her weariness with a selfish,
materialistic life and of her need for concerted,
self-forgetting action. But was blood-letting a
sufficiently modern remedy for such a diagnosis?
Would she lose her sense of futility and her con-
sciousness of moral failure, when thousands of
her young men were facing the dangers of war?
Would she not still feel her inadequacy unless she
was able to embody in a permanent organization
the cosmopolitanism which is the essence of her
spirit? We feared she would not be content when

ii6 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

she 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
whose sons had developed her raw prairies into
fertile fields, to 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
supply as by force of arms. Two terrible questions
were in men's minds. Could Germany hold out
during the spring and early summer until the new
crop was garnered? Could England feed herself
were the U-boat campaign in any degree success-
ful? For decades civilized nations had confidently
depended upon other nations for their supply of
cattle and of grain until this long continued war
had brought the primitive fear of starvation back
into the world with so many other elemental ter-
rors.

Again and again we came back for comfort to
the fact that the creation of an international or-
ganization of the Allies and Associated Powers
for the control of their common food supply, was
clearly transcending old national bounds. It
might be a new phase of political unification in ad-
vance of all former achievements, or it might be
one of those shifting alliances merely for war
purposes, of which European history affords so
many examples.

AFTER WAR WAS DECLARED 117

After war was declared, events moved with sur-
prising rapidity. We had scarcely returned from
Washington where we had been advocating a re-
ferendum 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
after a wretched night of internal debate. For
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 Ital-
ians. I knew many of them had come to this
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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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
they might flee for security. All that had been
told them of the American freedom, which they
had hoped to secure for themselves and their
children, had turned to ashes. I said nothing be-
yond the morning's greeting, but one of the men
stopped to speak to me. He had been in the Hull-
House citizenship classes, and>only a few months
before I had delivered a little address to those of
the class who had received their first papers, com-
bining congratulations with a welcome into the citi-
zenship of the United States. The new citizen
turned to me and spoke from the bitterness of his
heart: "I really have you to thank if I am sent
over to Europe to fight. I went into the citizen-
ship class in the first place because you asked me
to. If 1 hadn't my papers now I would be ex-
empted." I could only reply that none of us knew
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.

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

AFTER WAR WAS DECLARED 119

kinds, we assisted many hundreds of them to fill
out their questionnaires. 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
not to put down the ages of the little boys lest it
might make it easier later for the government to
conscript them, and they sometimes added:
"They did this way over there, but we did not
think 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 par-
ticipation 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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

as Lincoln once said of Henry Clay, "partly be-
cause it was his own and partly because it was a
free country."

It is impossible to live for years among immi-
grants and to fail to catch something of their
deep-seated hopes for the country of their adop-
tion, 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
last throw had been lost. Of the 450,000,000
people in Europe 400,000,000 were already in-
volved in the war. Could the United States do
nothing more intelligent than to add its quota of
100,000,000 people more?

When it became evident that the measure for
conscription would pass, those of us who had
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 to grant absolute exemption from military
service, there were in England at that time ap-
proximately six thousand men imprisoned or in-
terned in addition to the number who were per-
forming non-military service on the continent in
such organizations as the Friends' Ambulance
Units.

AFTER WAR WAS DECLARED 121

A committee of us waited upon the Secretary
of War, begging him to recommend like provision
in the conscription measure then under considera-
tion. 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 prob-
lem in the United States," and we left his office
more reassured perhaps than we had any right
to be.

It became evident in a very few weeks that no
provision of any sort was to be made for the con-
scientious objector as such. Each man who ob-
jected to war could choose his own method of mak-
ing his protest and be punished accordingly. If
he failed to report for his assigned camp he was
tried as a "deserter," if he refused to put on the
uniform, the charge was insubordination; if he de-
clined 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 to treat the conscientious
objector according to its own standard, but above
all he was to be given no opportunity to make a
dignified statement of his own case, no chance "to

122 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR
play the martyr or to hang out the white

I saw the Secretary of War twice again on the
matter, once with a committee and once alone, but
it was evident that he had taken the same stand
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 arrested for breaking a law and
tried as a criminal. Any other course might have
laid the government open to the charge of suppres-
sing a minority, which was to be avoided. The
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
military prisons and separated in military camps
under charge of violation of various sections of
the military code, was a board appointed to re-
view 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 sys-
tem which, however vulnerable, was removed
from the whim of individuals.

The word conscientious objector did not exactly
apply to many of these young men whom I came
to know, it is too rigid and too individualistic.
Many of them felt that war was archaic and they
were enveloped in a profound scepticism as to the

AFTER WAR WAS DECLARED 123

possibility of securing 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.

In various ways I met many of them. I always
urged each one if possible to conform to the mili-
tary regulations. When a man himself decided
that it was impossible I invariably heard his decis-
ion with a sinking of the heart. I recall a man
who was one of three to object to war out of five
thousand students in his college. He was segre-
gated in an eastern camp and afterwards allowed
to work unHer the Friends' Service Committee in
France, but finding that even non-combatant
service did not bring him relief, returned from
abroad preferring imprisonment to what seemed
to 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 or-
ganization itself; it was a great relief for him to
come home and "face the music," as he put it.

The sort of appeal to which he and his high-

124 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

minded kind were most persistently subjected
could but recall the remark attributed to the em-
peror 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
by swearing not to resist evil. These pitiful
wretches enjoy the peace and splendor of Rome
but will not move a finger to protect or to extend
either." In all the centuries since, the state had
found no better argument with which to coerce its
minority who disapproved through religious
scruple. But the early Christian could at least
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 bear-
ing 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 less accurately defined it. Such
satisfaction as that knowledge might have given
to the young Christians of Rome was persistently
denied the conscientious objector in the United
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

AFTER WAR WAS DECLARED 125

self-government for the entire prison. The tests
in psychiatry showed that the average mentality
of the conscientioius objector had registered well
above that of the drafted men throughout the
country in spite of the fact that many of their
number had inherited their objections to war from
teachings of simple religious sects and had never
individually thought out their positions. Perhaps
these latter at moments tasted martyrdom, but the
more sophisticated men would have none of it.
Even the man tied by his wrists to the barred door
of his cell for eight hours a day endeavored to
keep free from self-pity. In a letter written to me
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 Doukho-
bortsi, a non-resistant Russian sect in whom Tol-
stoy had been much interested, I found myself ap-
pealed to on behalf of a frightened little widow
who was at the 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
treated in all sorts of barbarous ways and finally,
after a prolonged ducking under a faucet in the

126 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

prison yard on a freezing day, had contracted
pneumonia and died. He had originally and con-
tinuously taken his stand against putting on the
uniform, and when his wife arrived at Leaven-
worth to take away the body, to her horror she
found that body, at last unable to resist, dressed
in a soldier's uniform. Her representative who
came to see me, with his broken English, could
convey but feebly the sense of outrage, of unfair-
ness, of 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 de-
nied the comforts of religion. Certainly the rest
of us were. I recall going to church one beautiful
summer's day in 1917 when the family whom I
was 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." Not a word of the anx-
ious, pitying, all-embracing love for lack of which
the world was perishing!

AFTER WAR WAS DECLARED 127

It 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 "se-
ditious," but from a desire to protect from pub-
licity and unfriendly discussion the last refuge that
was left us. We 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 down-
town office building in Chicago. We did not re-
move any of our records, being conscious that we
had nothing to hide, and our list of members with
their addresses was to be found in a conspicuous
card catalogue case. It was often far from pleas-
ant 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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

the door was often befouled in hideous
ways.

The secret service men finally entered the office
in search of material 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-
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 Recon-
ciliation, 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 dis-
credit pacifists. The only defense which in the
least appealed to the newspaper men was made
by one of themselves to the effect that the word
reconciliation was very like in sound and purport
to the word conciliation and that Nicholas Murray
Butler was chairman of an organization to pro-
mote international arbitration and conciliation,
and that every one knew he was for the war I

The Fellowship of course continued and for-
tunately was never disturbed in New York where
its national office was located. As a member of
the executive board I attended its meetings as
often as possible and always found a certain heal-
ing of the spirit.

The conception of solidarity, of a new heaven
and a new earth to be achieved by a band of

AFTER WAR WAS DECLARED 129

brothers leagued against the world, is 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 con-
ferences 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 inadmis-
sible in one place as in the other. One of the
young clergymen there had played a leading role
in the Lawrence strike, another had identified him-
self with a group of striking workmen in Patter-
son, New Jersey. No one there who had been a
pacifist in war time minimized the difficulties
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.

The fourth annual meeting of the Woman's
Peace Party was held in Philadelphia, at the
Friends' Meeting House, in December 1917.
Again we urged each other to promote the spirit
of good will : "Let those of opposed opinions be
loyal to the highest that they know, and let each

130 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

understand that the other may be equally patri-
otic;" to work for 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.

The national secretary, Mrs. Mead, reported
her wartime addresses in many states where, with
the use of tact, she found no difficulty "even in a
very super-heated atmosphere1' in speaking upon
"The New Preparedness," "After the War,
What?" "Civic Efficiency in Wartime," and simi-
lar topics. Many others were lecturing on the
food question; Miss Balch had published a book
entitled "Some Approaches to the Great Settle-
ment," but for the most part work was difficult
and decreased in volume.

It was only at the very closing hour of the meet-
ing that an agent came from the Department of
Justice. The little Quaker lady who was acting
as doorkeeper for the conference politely asked
him to wait a few minutes, as the conference was
devoting its closing minutes to silent prayer, fall-
ing into the custom of the meeting house under
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-

AFTER WAR WAS DECLARED 131

fied 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," al-
though many of them with divided convictions and
with heavy hearts.

CHAPTER VII.

PERSONAL REACTIONS DURING WAR.

AFTER the TTnitp^ Statpg 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 middle-

of-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 govern-

ment 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 justifications had their lure and one found

old pacifist friends on all the war boards and

even in the war department itself. Certainly we

133

PERSONAL REACTIONS DURING WAR 133

were all eager to accept whatever progressive
social changes came from the quick reorganization
demanded by war, and doubtless prohibition was
one of these, as the granting of woman suffrage
in the majority of the belligerent nations, was
another. But some of us had suspected that social
advance depends as much upon the process
through which it is secured as upon the result it-
self; if railroads are nationalized solely in order
to secure rapid transit of ammunition and men to
points of departure for Europe, when that gov-
ernmental 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 pos-
sible." But now I was pushed far toward the
left on the subject of the war and I became grad-
ually 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 re-
gretted having gone to the Woman's Congress at
The Hague in 1915, or having written a book on
Newer Ideals of Peace in 1911 which had made
my position so conspicuously clear, certainly far
oftener I was devoutly grateful that I had used
such unmistakable means of expression before the

134 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

time came when any spoken or written word in the
interests of Peace was forbidden.

It was on my return from The Hague Con-
gress in July, 1915, that I had my first experi-
ence of the determination on the part of the press
to make pacifist activity or propaganda so absurd
that it would be absolutely without influence and
its authors so discredited that nothing they might
say or do would be regarded as worthy of atten-
tion. I had been accustomed to newspaper men
for many years and had come to regard them as a
good natured fraternity, sometimes ignorant of
the subject on which they asked an interview, but
usually quite ready to report faithfully albeit some-
what sensationally. Hull-House had several
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 at misrepresentation on
the part of newspapers of all shades of opinion
'was quite new in my experience. After the
United States entered the war, the press through-
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. We came
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 my first
experience which came long before the United
States entered the war rather overwhelming.

Upon our return from the Woman's Interna-
tional Congress at The Hague in 1915, our local
organization in 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 presided and the United
States delegates made a public report of our im-
pressions in "war stricken Europe" and of the
moral resources in the various countries we visited
that might possibly be brought to bear against a
continuation of the war. We had been much im-
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 en-
thusiastic 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 responsi-
ble for the soldiers' presence in the trenches.

It was the latter statement which was my un-

I36 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

doing, for in illustration of it I said that in prac-
tically 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 had been given rum before such a charge,
the Germans ether and that the French were said
to use absinthe. To those who heard the address
it was quite clear that it was not because the young
men flinched at the risk of death but because they
had 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 I had notes for each of these
statements with the dates and names of the men
who had made them, and it did not occur to me
that the information was new or startling. I was,
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 com-
mented 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
sentimental nonsense. Mr. Davis himself had
recently returned from Europe and at once be-
came the defender of the heroic soldiers who were
being traduced and belittled. He lent the weight
of his name and his very able pen to the cause,

PERSONAL REACTIONS DURING WAR 137

but it really needed neither, for the misstatement
was repeated, usually with scathing comment,
from one end of the country to the other.

I was conscious, of course, that the story had
struck athwart the popular and long-cherished
conception of the nobility and heroism of the sol-
dier as such, and it seemed to me at the time that
there was no possibility of making any explana-
tion, at least until the sensation should have some-
what subsided. I might have repeated my more
sober statements with the explanation that
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 whom a common
ideal tragically pitted against each other."
Youth's response to the appeal made to their self-
sacrifice, 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." The fact that many of them were
obliged to make a great effort to bear themselves
gallantly in the final tests of "war's brutalities"
had nothing whatever 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 Washing-
ton, I returned to Chicago to a public meeting ar-
ranged in the Auditorium ; I was met at the train
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 hon-
ored by her fellow citizens. But the bayonet
story had preceded me and 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 cer-
tain German attacks; the fact that English sol-
diers knew when a bayonet charge was about to be
ordered because rations of rum were distributed
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 ex-
periences had become a reminiscence, the larger

PERSONAL REACTIONS DURING WAR 139

number and the most understanding ones came
from soldiers in active service.

Only once did I try a public explanation. After
an address in Chautauqua, New York, in which I
had not mentioned bayonets, I tried to remake my
original statement to a young man of the associ-
ated 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 even then and continued
to do so until I fell ill with a serious attack of
pleuro-pneumonia, which was the beginning of
three years of semi-invalidism. During weeks of
feverish discomfort I experienced a bald sense of
social opprobrium and wide-spread misunder-
standing 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
his precious cause in the keeping of those who con-
trol the sources of publicity and consider it a
patriotic duty to 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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

From the very beginning of the great war, as
the members of our group gradually became de-
fined 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
is shared by millions of others. The force of the
majority was so overwhelming that it seemed not
only impossible to hold one's own against it, but
at moments absolutely unnatural, and one secretly
yearned to participate in "the folly of all man-
kind." Our modern democratic teaching has
brought us to regard popular impulses as possess-
ing 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
his fellow countrymen? Is there not a great
value in mass judgment and in instinctive mass en-
thusiasm, and even if one were right a thousand
times over in conviction, was he not absolutely
wrong in abstaining from this communion with his
fellows? The misunderstanding on the part of

PERSONAL REACTIONS DURING 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. We gradually
ceased to state our position as we became con-
vinced that it served no practical purpose and,
worse than that, often found that the immediate
result was provocative.

We could not, however, lose the conviction that
as all other forms of growth begin with a varia-
tion from the mass, so the moral changes in human
affairs may also begin with a differing group or in-
dividual, sometimes with the one who at best is
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
centro-egotist, the insane man, who must be
thrown out by society for its own protection, it is
impossible to state. 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. Regarding this trait as the basis of
self-preservation it becomes perfectly natural for
the mass to call sucR an individual a traitor and
to insist that if he is not for the nation he is
against it. To this an estimated nine million peo-
ple can bear witness who have been burned as
witches and heretics, not by mobs, for of the peo-

142 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

pie who have been "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 ir-
relevant. We were constantly told by our friends
that to stand aside from the war mood of the
country was to surrender all possibility of future
influence, that we were committing intellectual sui-
cide, and would never again be trusted as responsi-
ble people or judicious advisers. Who were we to
differ with able statesmen, with 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 impos-
sible, that the priceless values of civilization which
were at stake could at this moment be saved only
by war? But these very dogmatic statements
spurred one to alarm. Was not war in the in-
terest of democracy for the salvation of civiliza-
tion a contradiction of terms, whoever said it or
however often it was repeated?

Then, too, we were always afraid of fanaticism,
of preferring a consistency of theory to the con-
scientious recognition of the social situation, of a

PERSONAL REACTIONS DURING WAR 143

failure to 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 come out for the
war and defended their positions with skill and
philosophic acumen. 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 en-
ables 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. We sorely
missed the contagion of mental activity, for we
are all much more dependent upon our social en-
vironment 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 consciousness of spiritual alienation was
lost only in moments of comradeship with the like
minded, which may explain the tendency of the

PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

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

It was inevitable that in many respects the
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
the sentiment against war. I was ill and out of
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 incident was most sensational and no one was
more 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
legitimate convention. The incident gave tre-
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 somewhat as a nervous shock experienced
in youth will long afterwards determine the action
of a mature man under widely different circum-
stances.

PERSONAL REACTIONS DURING WAR 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,
although later a severe reaction followed ex-
pressed through the Lusk Committee and other
agencies. Certainly neither city approximated
the freedom of London and nothing surprised me
more in 1915 and again in 1919 than the freedom
of speech permitted there.

We also read with a curious eagerness the stead-
ily increasing number of books published fromt
time to time during the war, which brought a re-
newal of one's faith or at least a touch of comfort.
These books broke through that twisting and sup-
pressing of awkward truths, which was encour-
aged and at times even ordered by the censorship.
Such manipulation of news and motives was doubt-
less necessary in the interest of war propaganda
if the people were to be kept in a fighting
mood. Perhaps the most vivid books came from
France, early from Romain Holland, later from
Barbusse, although it was interesting to see how
many people took the latter's burning indictment
of war merely as a further incitement against the
enemy. On the scientific side were the frequent
writings of David Starr Jordan and the remark-
able book of Nicolai on "The Biology of War."
The latter enabled one, at least in one's own mind,
to refute the pseudo-scientific statement that war

146 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

was valuable in securing the survival of the fittest.
Nicolai insisted that primitive man must neces-
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 com-
bat which is an outgrowth of the much later prop-
icrty instinct. No other species save ants, who also
j possess property, fights in masses against other
masses of its own kind. 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 evolu-
tionary survival which is based on the adjustment
of the organism to its environment. George Nas-
myth's book on Darwinism and the Social Order

PERSONAL REACTIONS DURING WAR 147

was another clear statement of the mental con-
fusion responsible for the insistence that even a
biological progress is secured through war. Mr.
Brailsford wrote constantly on the economic re-
sults of the war and we got much comfort
from John Hobson's "Toward International Gov-
ernment," which gave an authoritative account
of the enormous amount of human activity actu-
ally carried on through international organiza-
tions of all sorts, many of them under govern-
mental control. Lowes Dickenson's books, espe-
cially the spirited challenge in "The Choice Before
Us," left his readers with the distinct impression
that "war is not inevitable but proceeds from defi-
nite and removable causes." From every such
book the pacifist was forced to the conclusion that
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-

i48 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

tance from an almost pre-human past. An in-
stinct which once enabled the man-pack to survive
when it was a question of keeping together or of
perishing off the face of the earth, is perhaps not
underdeveloped in any of us. There is a distinct
physical as well as moral strain when this instinct
is steadily suppressed or at least ignored.

The large number of deaths among the older
pacifists in all the 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
consumed in holding one's own in a hostile world.
These older men, Kier Hardie and Lord Court-
ney in England, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Rauchen-
busch, Washington Gladden in the United States,
Lammasch and Fried in Austria, had been hon-
ored by their fellow citizens because of marked
ability to interpret and understand them. Sud-
denly to find every public utterance wilfully mis-
construed, 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

PERSONAL REACTIONS DURING WAR 149

in the time of 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 en-
gaged in war, and that exhaustion on one or both
sides can alone bring a contest of physical force
to an end."

On the other hand there were many times when
we stubbornly asked ourselves, what after all, has
maintained the human race on this old globe de-
spite all the calamities of nature and all the tragic
failings of mankind, if not faith in new possibil-
ities, and courage to advocate them. Doubtless
many times these new possibilities were declared
by a man who, 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 morbid sense of contradiction and
inexplicable suicide which modern war implies?
We certainly had none of the internal contentment

150 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

of the doctrinnaire, the ineffable solace of the
self-righteous which was imputed to us. No one
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. There was scant solace to be found in this
type of statement: "The worth of every convic-
tion consists precisely in the steadfastness with
which it is held," perhaps because we suffered
from the fact that we were no longer living in a
period of dogma and were therefore in no posi-
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 sin-
cere and mature opinion which from the very na-
ture of things can have no justification in works.
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
regarded as pure dogma. We were thrust into
the position of the doctrinnaire, and although, had
we been permitted, we might have cited both his-
toric and scientific tests of our so-called doctrine
of Peace, for the moment any sanction even by
way of illustration was impossible.

PERSONAL REACTIONS DURING WAR 151 I

It therefore came about that ability to hold out [
against mass suggestion, to honestly differ from
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

IN line with a resolution passed at our Hague
Congress in 1915, "that our next Congress should
be held at the time and place of the official Peace
Conference," each of the national sections had ap-
pointed 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 repre-
sented there.

In planning a congress of women it was borne
in mind that the official Conference at the end
of the war determining the terms of peace would
be largely composed of diplomats who are neces-
sarily 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 hith-
erto 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 same time
and in the same place as the official Peace Con-
ference After the War.

The tremendous movement for a League of Na-
tions, the gathering together of experts and schol-
ars as aids to the official Peace Commissioners had
of course all developed after our Congress at
The Hague in 1915, but all the more did we hope
for a great spiritual awakening in international
affairs. We recalled that it was at the Congress of
Vienna in 1815 after the Napoleonic wars that the
nations represented there, as part of their over-
whelming 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 Confer-,
ence would assemble in Paris all the plans for our
Woman's Congress fell through. It was neces-

154 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

sary, of course, for us to meet in a neutral country
as naturally the women from the Central Powers
could not go to France. This inevitable change
of place involved much cabling and delay, and
there were also some difficulties in regard to pass-
ports even for neutral Switzerland.

The group of American delegates arriving in
Paris at Easter, 1919 found that the English pass-
ports had been delayed and that the brilliant presi-
dent of our French Section and her fellow officers
had been refused theirs. After various meetings
in Paris, at which the French, English and Ameri-
can sections were well represented, the Congress
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 con-
nected both with the Peace Conference and the
Food Administration, and by some of us in a five-
days' visit to the devastated regions, which was
made by automobile, kindly arranged for us by the
American Red Cross.

Day after 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
of munitions, exploded 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
always the old people who had come back first,
for they least of all could brook the life of refu-
gees. 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 huge trucks. In the Argonne we still saw
clusters of wooden crosses surmounting the heaps
of clay, each cross with its metal tag for inscrip-
tion.

I had a personal interest in these graves for my
oldest nephew had fallen in the Argonne. We
searched for his grave through one long afternoon
but, owing to the incompleteness of our map and
the fact that there was no living soul to consult
in the village nearest the farm on which the battle
had been fought, we failed to find it. We met;
other people on the same errand, one a French
Cure who knew the ground with a sad intimacy.

156 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

We spent the following night at the headquar-
ters of the reconstruction work of the Friends'
Service 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 out-
lying villages where they were constructing tem-
porary 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 be-
half 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 we had searched the day before, and
although we early abandoned the motor in the
shell wrecked road, he finally found the farm and
grave we sought, the third in one of three long
rows.

/* On May 6, 1915, the Executive Committee of
I the Woman's International Committee for Per-
\jnanent Peace met in Zurich to prepare the agenda

IN EUROPE DURING THE ARMISTICE 157

of the Congress. The members represented
groups of women who, living in fourteen differ-
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 re-
vealed from time to time when committee mem-
bers recounted, merely by way of explanation in
regard to incomplete records or absent delegates,
such similar experiences with governmental espion-
age 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-com-
mittees 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 some-
thing 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 arrange-
ments that justice shall be rendered and peace
maintained." We knew that there would be diffi-

158 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

culties in 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
rancorous memories, from wilful misunderstand-
ing or distrust of so-called enemies.

Therefore in reply to the often repeated predic-
tion 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 still prevailing during the peace nego-
tiations, we could only state our conviction that
the women eligible to membership in the Congress
had suffered too much during the war, had been
too close to the clarifying spirit of reality to in-
dulge in any sentimental or unconsidered state-
ments.

Yet inevitably we felt a certain restraint — self-
consciousness would perhaps be a better word —
when we considered seeing the "alien enemy" face
to face. I imagine many of the experiences were
similar to my own when walking the streets of
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
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 EUROPE DURING THE ARMISTICE 159

woman I had seen three years before. She was
not only emaciated as by a wasting illness, look-
ing as if she needed immediate hospital care — she
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
appearance. My first reaction was one of over-
whelming pity and alarm as I suddenly discovered
my friend standing at the very gate of death. This
was quickly followed by the same sort of indigna-
tion I had first felt in the presence of the starving
children at Lille. What were we all about that
such things were allowed to happen in a so-called
civilized world? Certainly all extraneous differ-
ences fell from us as we stood together in the
spring sunshine and spoke of the coming Congress
which, feeble as it was, yet gave a demonstration
that a few women were to be found in each coun-
try who could not brook that such a state of af-
fairs should go unchallenged. At the evening
meeting preceding the opening of the Congress
this dying woman told us that many Austrian
women had resented not so much the starvation
itself as the fact that day after day they had been
obliged to keep their minds steadily on the sub-
ject of procuring food until all other objects for
living were absolutely excluded. To the horror
and anxieties of war had been added the sordid-

160 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

ness of sheer animal hunger with its inhibitions.
She spoke in the white marble hall of the Univers-
ity of Zurich. The same meeting was addressed
by a German delegate and by an American who
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 neu-
tral country where it entailed no odium to be a
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 unemploy-
ment 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 Con-
ference immediately to develop the inter-
allied organizations formed for purposes of
war into an international organization for
purposes of peace, so that the resources of the
world — food, raw materials, finance, trans-
port— shall be made available for the relief
of the peoples of all countries from famine
and pestilence.

IN EUROPE DURING THE ARMISTICE 161

"To this end it urges that immediate ac-
tion 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 immedi-
* ate international action on these lines can
save humanity and bring about the perma-
nent 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 Con-
gress 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
city. As I stood in the old-fashioned high pulpit
to announce the fact that a telegram had been re-
ceived from President Wilson, there fell a hush,
a sense of tension on the great audience that is
difficult to describe. It was as if out of the con-

162 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

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

As the Congress had received through our press
correspondent an advance copy of the treaty and
was in actual session the very day the treaty was
made public, we were naturally in a position to be
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 seri-
ously 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."

"By guaranteeing the fruits of the secret
treaties to the conquerors, the Terms of
Peace tacitly sanction secret diplomacy, deny
the principles of self-determination, recog-
nize 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

IN EUROPE DURING THE ARMISTICE 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 re-
sult in the spread of hatred and anarchy
within each nation.

"With a deep sense of responsibility this
Congress strongly urges the Allied and As-
sociated Governments to accept such amend-
ments of the Terms, as shall bring the peace
into harmony with those principles first enu-
merated by President Wilson upon the faith-
ful 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 dele-
gation and allowed us to place the various resolu-
tions in their hands, but we inevitably encountered
much bitter criticism from the Allied press. Only
slowly did public opinion reach a point of view
similar to ours : Keynes' epoch-making book was
not published until a year later, but so widely was
his position ratified that on the second celebration
of Armistice day in Kingsbury House in London at
a meeting of ex-soldiers and sailors, one of the lat-
ter who had been sorely wounded, spoke as fol-
lows : "For every man who a year ago knew and
said that the Peace Treaty was immoral in con-

164 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

ception and would be disastrous, there are thou-
sands who say it now."

There was much discussion at the Zurich Con-
gress on the League of Nations; the first commit-
tee made a majority and 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 Na-
tions. As the formal organization of the League
was open to change by the Peace Conference still
sitting, a number of careful suggestions were for-
mulated 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 re-
ceived by Signor Orlando and we also had a hear-
ing 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 repre-
sentatives 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 "ex-
perts" were enthusiastic about them.

Throughout the meetings of the Zurich Con-
gress the delegates, secure in their sense of good

IN EUROPE DURING THE ARMISTICE 165

will and mutual understanding, spoke freely not
only of their experiences during the trial of war,
but also of the methods which they were advocat-
ing for the difficult period of social and industrial
re-adjustment following the war. Some of our
delegates represented nations in which revolutions
with and without bloodshed had already taken
place. The members of our organization had
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 paci-
fists had already played this role in the revolu-
tions in Bavaria, in Austria, in Hungary. Having
so soon come together under the shadow of the
great war itself, we had an opportunity to hear
early of the courageous and intelligent action tak-
en by our own groups in the widespread war after
the war.

The Congress ending with a banquet given by
the town officials, was attended by delegates from
fifteen different countries, many of whom had
come under great difficulties. Despite sharp dif-
ferences as to terms in the Treaty, 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 list of resolutions on interna-
tional affairs, a woman's charter and an education
program were drawn up. The name of the or-

1 66 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

ganization was changed to iiWonjaji^s Interna-
tional League for Peace and FreedonV7~and Ue-
neva, as the seat of Tlie~League uf Nations, was
made the headquarters. Emily Balch, from the
United States, a professor of economics in Welles-
ley College became secretary, agreeing to remain
in Europe for the following two years.

On our return to Paris there were many symp-
toms 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 indus-
trial 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
York to Fiume. And yet even at that moment the
food blockade, hitherto regarded as a war meas-

IN EUROPE DURING THE ARMISTICE 167

ure, was being applied both to Hungary and Rus-
sia as pressure against their political arrange-
ments, foreboding sinister possibilities. The Zu-
rich Congress had made a first protest against this
unfair use of the newly formulated knowledge of
the world's food supply and of a centralized meth-
od for its distribution. There was a soviet regime
in Hungary during our meeting in Zurich. Of
our two delegates from Hungary, one was in sym-
pathy with it and one was not, but they both felt
hotly against the blockade which had been insti-
tuted 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 Con-
gress, Dr. Hamilton and I accepted an invitation
from the American Friends' Service Committee
to go into Germany. In explanation of our jour-
ney 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
Friends, July 4th, 1919: "We are thankful to
learn that certain members of the Religious So-
ciety of Friends are now proceeding to Germany
under a deep sense of the need which exists for
mutual friendly intercourse and fellowship be-
tween those who all belong to the same great hu-
man family and who have been separated during
these sad years of war.

168 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

».

"Our friends are traveling on behalf of the
Committee which has under its care the arrange-
ments 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 Ger-
many via Cologne, and reached Berlin July 6th;
the three American members who traveled through
Holland and crossed the border on the first civ-
ilian passports issued there since the signing of
peace, arrived in Berlin July 7th. Dr. Aletta
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 Asso-
ciation for the Promotion of the League of Na-
tions, was naturally our guide and advisor.

We 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 ship-
wreck of a nation and they had no time for resent-

IN EUROPE DURING THE ARMISTICE 169

ments. They realized that if 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.

We had, of course, seen something of the wide-
spread European starvation before we went into
Germany ; our first view in Europe of starved chil-
dren was in the city of Lille in Northern France,
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 impres-
sion was of a line of moving skeletons; their little
shoulder blades stuck straight out, the vertebrae
were all perfectly distinct as were their ribs, and
their 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 bombard-
ment of Lille. He therefore whispered his in-
structions to the children as he applied his stetho-
scope and the children, thinking it was some sort
of game, all whispered back to him. It was in-

I7o PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

credibly pathetic and unreal and we could but ac-
cept the doctor's grave statement that only by
a system of careful superfeeding, could any of
these boys grow into normal men. We had also
seen starved children in Switzerland : six hundred
Viennese children arriving in Zurich to be guests
in private households. As they stood upon the
station platforms without any of the bustle and
chatter naturally associated with a large number
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 choc-
olates, telling them of the children at home who
were waiting for them, but there was little re-
sponse because there was no vitality with which to
make it.

We were reminded of these children week after
week as we visited Berlin, or Frankfort am Main,
or the cities of Saxony and the villages throughout
the Erzgebirge in which the children had been
starved throughout the long period of the war
and of the armistice. Perhaps an experience in
Leipzig was typical when we visited a public play-
ground 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 DURING THE ARMISTICE 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 some-
times told us, they hoped thus to avert the hard-
est thing they had to bear; hearing the children
whimper and moan for hours after they were put
to bed because they were too hungry to go to
sleep.

These Leipzig children were quite as listless
as all the others 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
city physician, who was with us, challenged the
playground director as to his ability to obtain the
milk, to which the director replied that he was not
sure that he could, but that there was a prospect
for it, and that the children must have something
to hope for, that that was the prerogative of the
young. With this uncertain hope we left them to
visit day nurseries, child welfare stations, schools
and orphanages where the midday meal was prac-
tically the same war soup. We were told by

172 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

probation officers and charity workers of starved
children who stole the family furniture and cloth-
ing, books and kitchen utensils in order to sell
them for food, who pulled unripe potatoes and
turnips from the fields for miles surrounding the
cities, to keep themselves alive.

Our experiences in the midst of widespread
misery, did not differ 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 high-
est authorities. Mr. Hoover had recently de-
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
statement when he said that 100,000,000 persons
in Europe were facing starvation. All this was
made much worse by the rapid decline in the
value of European money in the markets of the
world.

One turned instinctively to the newly created
League of Nations. Could it have considered this
multitude of starving children as its concrete prob-
lem, feeding them might have been the quickest
way to restore the divided European nations to
human and kindly relationship. Was all this de-
vastation the result of hypernationalism and might
not the very recognition of a human obligation

IN EUROPE DURING THE ARMISTICE 173

irrespective of national boundaries form the na-
tural beginning of better international relation-
ships?

My entire experience in Europe in 1915 was in
marked contrast to my impressions received thirty-
four years earlier, inij^Si^ Nationalism was also
the great word then, but with quite another con-
tent. At that moment in all political matters the
great popular word had been Unity; a coming to-
gether into new national systems of little states
which had long been separated. The words of
Mazzini, who had died scarcely a decade before,
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 smacked of learn-
ing, in those days, to use the words 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 move-
ments h^d hfpn thr\r burning hiinunlt^ianisnr, a

sense that the new groupings were but a prepara-
tion for a wider synthesis, that a federation of at

174 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

least the European states 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
once been combined — a whole ring of states was
pulling out of Mother Russia, Bavaria was threat-
ening to leave Germany, and Italy, in the name
of nationalism was separating a line of coast with
its hinterland of Slavs, from their newly found
brethren. Whereas nationalism thirty years ear-
lier had seemed generous and inclusive, stressing
likenesses, it now appeared dogmatic and ruth-
less, insisting upon historic prerogatives quite in-
dependent of the popular will. Had the national-
istic fervor become overgrown and over-reached
itself, or was it 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
tried methods of propaganda. The early spon-
taneity had changed into an authoritative imposi-
tion of power. One received the impression every-
where in that moment when nationalism was
so tremendously stressed, that the nation was
demanding worship and devotion for its own sake

IN EUROPE DURING THE ARMISTICE 175

similar to that of the mediaeval church, as if
it existed for its own ends of growth and power
irrespective of the tests of reality. It demanded
unqualified obedience, denounced as heretics all
who differed, insisted that it alone had the truth,
and exhibited all the well known signs of dogma-
tism, including a habit of considering ordinary
standards inapplicable to a certain line of conduct
if it were inspired by motives beyond reproach.

We saw arriving in Rotterdam, from the Ger-
man colonies in Africa and the Pacific, hundreds of
German families who had been driven from their
pioneer homes and their colonial business under-
takings, primarily because they belonged to the
outlaw nation; in many of the railroad stations in
Germany there were posted directions for the
fugitives 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 fa-
culties and the alienation of old friends. There
was something about it all that was curiously ana-
chronistic like the expulsion of the Jews from
Spain, or Cromwell's drive through Ireland when
the Catholics took refuge in the barren west coun-
try, or of the action by which France had made
herself poorer for generations when she banished

176 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

her Huguenots. It is as if nationalism, through
the terms of the Peace Conference itself, had
fallen back into an earlier psychology, exhibit-
ing 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 Bo-
hemia; the imperialistic nationalism of empires
like Great Britain in which colonial expansion had
become the normal expression and is no longer
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 it would be found that all types
have displayed the highest devotion to their
ideals.

It is possible that such a hypothetical Council
would discover that as the greatest religious war
came at the very moment when men were decid-
ing 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 EUROPE DURING THE ARMISTICE 177

at a similar moment in regard to national dogmas.
The world, at the very verge of the creation of
the League of Nations may be entering an era
when 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 late in August, inevitably dis-
appointed in the 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 in Philadelphia, again at the Friends'
Meeting House. The reports showed that during
the war the state branches had modified their ac-
tivities in various ways. The Massachusetts
branch had carried on war relief of 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 in defense of
its 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 Zu-
rich resolutions were accepted for substance of
doctrine and recommended for study.

We made a careful restatement of our policies,
but the bald outline gave no more than a hint of
the indomitable faith of the women gathered
there who, after nearly five years of anxiety and

178

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 execu-
tive secretaries, she deliberately revived an organ-
ization devoted to the discredited cause of Peace
at a moment when the established peace societies
with which she had been long connected had care-
fully stripped themselves of all activity.

In some respects it was more difficult at that
time to be known as a pacifist than it had been dur-
ing the war, and if any of us had ever imagined
that our troubles would be over when the war
ended, we were doomed to disappointment. There
were many illustrations of our continued unpopu-
larity. In the early days of the armistice, for
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 Mrs. Wilson at the White House and also to
me. My cable was never delivered and I knew
nothing but what the newspapers reported con-

180 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

cerning it, although the incident started an inter-
minable chain of comment and speculation as to
why I should have been selected, none of which
stumbled upon the simple truth that I had presided
over a Congress at The Hague attended by two
of the signatories of the cable.

The incident, 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 pos-
sible 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
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-Ameri-
cans," 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 it ap-
peared in any Chicago newspaper printed in Eng-
lish. Milwaukee, St. Louis and Cleveland, how-
ever, were more difficult, although my theme was

THE AFTERMATH OF WAR 181

purely humanitarian with no word of politics. I
told no audience that our passports had been
viseed in Frankfort in the city hall flying a red
flag, that housing space was carefully propor-
tioned with reference to the need of the inhabi-
tants and other such matters, which would have
shocked the audience of prosperous German-
Americans quite as much as any one else. We
always told these audiences as we told many
others 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 bound-
aries. Some money was always sent to Philadel-
phia for Germany but quite often it was carefully
marked for one of the Allied countries in which
the Friends' Service Committee was also at work.
I was equally grateful for those contributions but
I 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
forgive our enemies. No such sentiment was
uttered in my hearing during that winter, al-
though in the early Spring I was much cheered
at a meeting in Denver when a club woman
quoted apropos of feeding German children, from
Bojer's "The Great Hunger" : "I sow corn in the

1 82 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

field of mine enemy in order to prove the exist-
ence of God."

It was a period or pronounced reaction, char-
acterized by all sorts of espionage, of wholesale
raids, arrests and deportations. Liberals every-
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 manifesta-
tions 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 re-
garded 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

THE AFTERMATH OF WAR 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, Bohem-
ians and Croatians, were eager to be called by
their new names. They were keenly alive to the
fresh start made in 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 peas-
ant proprietorship occurring not only in the vari-
ous countries in which actual revolutions had taken
place as in Hungary and Russia, but in other coun-
tries such as Roumania, where there had been no
violent revolution. These immigrants were very
eager to know what share they themselves might
have in these great happenings if they returned.
They longed to participate in the founding of a
new state which might guarantee 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 some-
times of their wives and children.

Had we as citizens of the United States made a

184 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

widespread and generous response to this over-
whelming 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 to restore the word alien to a righte-
ous use and to end its service as a term of re-
proach. To ignore the natural anxiety of the Rus-
sians and to fail 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 situ-
ation 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
living, 275 went to the Western Coast hoping for
an opportunity to embark for Siberia and thus to
reach Russia. Most of them were denied pass-
ports and the enforced retention of so many peo-
ple constantly made for what came to be called
social unrest. We would sometimes hear a Rus-
sian 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

THE AFTERMATH OF WAR 185

homesick to go back to her." In Chicago many of
those 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 mechanics they themselves founded schools
in applied mathematics, in mechanical drawing,
in pattern work, in automobiling.

It was one of these latter schools in Chicago,
where they were so cautious that they did not
teach any sort of history or economics, which was
raided in the early part of January, 1920. A
general raid under the direction of the federal
Department of Justice "ran in" numbers of Chi-
cago 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-
able places of detention. The automobile school
was carried off bodily, the teachers, the sixty-four
pupils, the books and papers ; the latter were con-
sidered valuable because the algebraic formulas
appeared so incriminating.

One Russian among those arrested on January
ist, 1920, I had known for many years as a
member of a Tolstoy society, which I had attended
a 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 ad-
vance 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 floor, they could only
stand closely together, take turns in lying on the
benches and in standing by the door where they
might exercise by stretching their hands to the
top bars. 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
could feed him cereals and milk. As a young man
he had edited the periodical of a humanitarian so-
ciety in Russia and it was as a convinced humani-
tarian that he began to study Tolstoy. Because
the grand jury held him for trial under a state
charge he could not even be deported if the fed-
eral charge were sustained. It was impossible,
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 pre-
siding at a meeting of protest against such viola-
tion of constitutional rights; of identification with

THE AFTERMATH OF WAR 187

the vigorous Civil Liberties Union in New York
and its Chicago branch, did not add to my respect-
ability in the eyes of 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 knowledge in the midst of a social
crisis where an interpreter would be valuable.
Could not such activity be designated as "settle-
ment work?" It was certainly so regarded by a
handful of settlement people in Boston and New
York as well as Chicago. There were two con-
tending 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 em-
ployer's belief that such discussion per se was
dangerous.

In the midst of the world-wide social confusion
and distress, there inevitably developed a pro-
found scepticism as to the value of established n
stitutions. The situation in itself afforded a chal-
lenge, for men longed to turn from the animosi-
ties of war and from the futility of the peace i /
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'

1 88 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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
in the Cook County jail for many months await-
ing trial. Our jail conditions, which are always
bad, were made worse through the inevitable over-
crowding resulting from the addition of so many
federal prisoners. One of the men died, one be-
came insane, one, a temperamental Irishman, fell
into a profound melancholy after he had been
obliged to listen throughout the night to the erec-
tion 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 who was hearing the
case lowered the bail and released others on their
uown 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

THE AFTERMATH OF WAR 189

plainly far 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 col-
lect 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
charity. The I. W. W.'s were not on the whole
"pacifists" and I used to regret sometimes that
our group should be the one fated to perform this
purely humanitarian function which would cer-
tainly become associated with sedition in the public
mind. We should however logically have escaped
all criticism for at that very moment the repre-
sentatives of "patriotic" societies working in the
prison camps of the most backward countries at
war, were allowed to separate the tubercular pris-
oners from their fellows.

The Berger trial came in January of the wretch-
ed 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 Ben-
jamin 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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

with three Chicago men, one a clergyman whom I
had known for years, for "conspiring to overthrow
the government of the United States."

Later there was the sudden rise of "agents pro-
vocateurs" in industrial strikes, and the strikers
believed that they were employed at Gary, by the
secret service department of the government itself.
The stories that were constantly current recalled
my bewilderment 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 remark-
able life, which were undisputed, might easily
support either theory, quite as in a famous Eng-
lish trial for sedition a prisoner, named Watts,
had been so used by both sides that the English
court itself could not determine his status. It
was hard to believe the story that a Russian well
known as of the Czar's police, had organized
twenty-four men in Gary for "direct action," had
supplied them freely both with radical literature
and with firearms but that fortunately just before
the headquarters were raided the strike leaders
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 un-
der military control, was deliberately putting them
in danger of their fives.

So it was perhaps not surprising that the Rus-

THE AFTERMATH OF WAR 191

sians became angry and confused and were quite
sure that they were being incited and betrayed by
government agents. The Russians were even sus-
picious 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
Cross ; it was suspected that the Settlements even,
although they were furnishing bail, might be in
collusion with the Red Cross Society.

I got a certain historic perspective, if not com-
fort at least enlargement of view, by being able
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, similar to those
issued by our Security Leagues, 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 Eng-
lish society. The French Revolution was continu-
ally used as a warning, for in it could be seen the
inevitable and terrible end of the first steps to-
ward democracy. Even when the panic subsided

192 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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 this attitude of the English gentry long
since dead, being repeated in our so-called upper
classes, especially among people in professional
and financial circles ? Among them and their fam-
ilies war work opened a new type of activity, more
socialized in form than many of them had ever
known before, and it also gave an outlet to their
higher emotions. In the minds of many good
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 to this, of course, were the millions of peo-
ple throughout the country who were actually in
the clutches of those unknown and subhuman
forces which may easily destroy the life of man-
kind. A scholar has said of them, "morally it
would seem that these forces are not better but
less good than mankind, for man at least loves and
pities and tries to understand." Such forces may
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

THE AFTERMATH OF WAR 193

the unreason, the superstition, the folly and in-
justice of the old "law of the herd." There was
possibly still another factor in the situation in re-
gard to Russia, — the acid test, a touch of the
peculiar bitterness evolved during a strike where
property interests are assailed. That typical
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
seemed to hold the nation in its grip, or was it that
the war spirit, having been painstakingly evolved
by the united press of the civilized world, could not
easily be exorcised? The way had made obvious
the sheer inability of the world to prevent terroi
and misery. It had been a great revelation oJ
feebleness, as if weakness, ignorance and over-|
weening nationalism had combined to produce'
something much more cruel than any calculated
cruelty could have been. Was the universal
happiness which seemed to envelop the United
States as well as Europe an inevitable aftermath
of war?

So far as we had anticipated any contribution
from the non-resistant Russian peasant to the
cause of Universal Peace, the events in militarized

194 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

Russia during the years after the war threw us into
black despair. Not only had the Bolshevist lead-
ers 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
both for industry and transportation. It was
quite possible that the Russian revolutionists were
making the same mistake in thus forging a new
tool for their own use which earlier revolution-
ists had made when they invented universal mili-
tary conscription. An example of the failure of
trying to cast out the devil by Beezlebub, it had
been used as a temporary expedient when the
first French revolutionists were fighting "the
world," but had gradually become an established
thing, and in the end was the chief implement of
reaction. It alone has thrown Europe back tre-
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 in
Europe has enormously increased since the middle
ages; then out of every thousand men four were
soldiers, now out of every thousand men a hundred
and twenty to a hundred and fifty are soldiers.
These were the figures before the great war.

Even the League of Nations, during the first
year of its existence brought little comfort. Inci-

THE AFTERMATH OF WAR 195

dent to the irritating and highly individualistic
position which the pacifist was forced to assume
throughout the war, was the difficulty of combin-
ing with his old friends and colleagues in efforts
for world organization which seemed so reason-
able. Before I went to The Hague in the spring
of 1915 I had known something of Mr. Hamil-
ton Holt's plan to organize a league whose propa-
ganda 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 con-
ditions. It 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 to the dislocation of the times, al-
ready so out of joint. Had I yielded to my join-
ing impulse I should certainly have been obliged
to resign later. The League to Enforce Peace
held a meeting in New York City soon after the
United States had entered the war and put forth a
program hard to reconcile even with its first state-
ment of principles. But after the armistice had
been signed, at a meeting held in Madison, Wis-
consin, in the winter of 1919, their clear statement
of a League of Nations program brought to their

I96 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

banner many of the doubtful, myself among
them.

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
illustrate "the hopes of mankind." Among my
audiences in the half dozen states in which I lec-
tured there would often be a Pole who rejoiced
that after a hundred and fifty years of oppression
Poland would be free; an Italian longing impa-
tiently to welcome back Italia Irredenta; a Bo-
hemian exulting that the long struggle of his fel-
low-countrymen had at last reached success; an
Armenian who saw the end of Turkish rule. Con-
scious at moments that all this portended perhaps
too much nationalism, I could only assure myself
and an audience absorbed in animated discussion,
that such a state of mind was inevitable after war,
and would doubtless find its place in the plans
being developed in Paris.

I had a sharp reminder in the midst of this hal-
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 pro-
gram committee to address one of the long estab-
lished woman's organizations of Chicago upon the
League of Nations, only to find that there was a

THE AFTERMATH OF WAR 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
although fortunately a day or two later I spoke
in Chicago under the direct auspices of the League
to Enforce Peace with ex-President Taft presid-
ing, which I afterward 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.

The League of Nations afforded an opportu-
nity for wide difference of opinion in every group.
The Woman's Peace Party held its annual meet-
ing in Chicago in the spring of 1920 and found our
Branches fairly divided upon the subject. The
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 Phila-
delphia branch, composed largely of clear-sighted
Quakers and of two other branches which were
more radical. The difference of opinion was

i98 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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 inter-
national organization. Some of our members co-
operated with the League of Free Nations Asso-
ciation (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 all believed that the ardor and self sacrifice
so characteristic of youth could be enlisted for the
vitally energetic role required to inaugurate a
new type of international life in the world. We
realized that it is only the ardent spirits, the lovers
of mankind, who can break down the suspicion and
lack of understanding which have so long pre-
vented the changes upon which international good
order depend. These men of good will we be-
lieved, 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 the League of Nations,
there were times when we felt that the govern-
ments 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 had absolutely
unfitted them.

In a book entitled "International Government"
put out by the Fabian Society, its author, Leonard
Woolf, demonstrates the super-caution govern-
ments traditionally exhibit in regard to all foreign
relationships even when under the pressure of
great human needs. The illustrations I remember
most distinctly were the "International Diplo-
matic Conferences" following epidemics of chol-
era in Europe between 1851 and 1892. Five times
these Conferences, convened in haste and dread,
adjourned without action, largely because each,

nation was afraid to delegate any power to an-

199

200 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

other, lest national sovereignty be impaired. The
last European epidemic of cholera broke out in
1892. Even then national prestige and other ab-
stractions dear to the heart of the diplomat con-
fined 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 traffic and Asiatic trading crossed each
other. Mr. Woolf points out that if the state
had any connection with the people, it 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 be-
cause there was developing a new sense of respon-
sibility for public health, scientists and doctors
from many nations had become organized into
International Associations. In fact there were
so many of these, that a "Permanent International
Commission of the International Congresses of
Medicine" was finally established. Such organiza-
tions 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 201

Did something of this spirit, still surviving, in-
evitably tend to inhibit action among the repre-
sentatives of the nations first collected under the
auspices of the League of Nations, and will the
League ever be able to depend upon nationalism
even multiplied by forty-eight or sixty? Must not
the League evoke a human motive transcending
and yet embracing all particularist nationalisms,
before it can function with validity?

During the first year of the League the popular
enthusiasm seemed turned into suspicion, the com-
mon man distrusted the League because it was so
indifferent to the 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
and to return its remote prisoners; because it so
cautiously refused to become the tentative instru-
ment of the longed for new age. Certainly its
constitution and early pronouncements were disap-
pointing. During the first months of its existence
the League of Nations, apparently ignoring the
social conditions of Europe and lacking the incen-
tives which arise from developing economic re-
sources had fallen back upon the political concepts
of the 1 8th century, more abstractly noble than
our own perhaps, but frankly borrowed and there-
fore failing both in fidelity and endurance.

It may be necessary, as has been said, to turn
the State and its purposes into an idealistic ab-

202 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

straction before men are willing to fight to the
death for it, but it was all the more necessary after
the 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 relation-
ships, 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
for a moment and they became conscious of an un-
expected sense of relief, as if they had returned to
a state of primitive well-being. The old tribal
sense of solidarity, of belonging to the whole, was
enormously revived by the war when the strain of
a common danger brought the members, not only
of one nation but of many nations, into a new
realization of solidarity and of a primitive inter-
dependence. In the various armies and later
among the civilian populations, two of men's
earliest instincts which had existed in age-long
companionship became widely operative; the first
might be called security from attack, the second
security from starvation. Both of them origin-
ated in tribal habits and the two motives are still
present in some form in all governments.

A FOOD CHALLENGE 203

Throughout the war the first instinct was util-
ized to its 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 or-
ganizations 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 to spend their lives in its
assertion, surely something might be done with
the second, also on an international scale, to re-
make destroyed civilization.

Throughout their period of service in the army,
a multitude of 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
were living differently from the mass of their fel-
lows. As he came home, one returned soldier
after another trying to explain why he found it
hard to settle back into his previous life, ex-
pressed more or less coherently that he 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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

and steadfastness, were the moments of his high-
est consciousness of solidarity, but on the other
hand he must have caught an expression of it at
other times. The soldier knew, that as a mere
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
returned men did not talk very freely of their ex-
periences, one gradually confirmed what the news-
papers and magazines were then reporting, that
the returned soldiers were restless and unhappy.
I remember one Sunday afternoon when Hull-
House gave a reception to the members of the
Hull-House 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
haltingly described the enthusiasm of mass action,
the unquestioning comradeship of identical aims
which army experiences had brought them.

Throughout the war something of the same en-
thusiasm had come to be developed in regard to
feeding the world. It also became unnatural for
an individual to stand outside of the wide-spread
effort to avert starvation. He was overwhelmed
with a sense of mal-adjustment, of positive wrong-
doing 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 ex-
cuse 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, over-
whelmed many civilians when the grim necessity
of feeding millions of soldiers and of relieving the
bitter hunger of entire populations in remote
countries, was constantly with them. The neces-
sity for rationing stirred that comradeship which
is expressed by a common table, and also healed a
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
that each 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,
human nature has lost something essential to its
happiness? The great religious teachers 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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

For the moment, at least, 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 re-
sume her pre-war existence, and the returned sol-
dier who had discovered such a genuine comrade-
ship that he pronounced the old college esprit de
corps tame by contrast.

Human nature, in spite of its marvelous adapt-
ability, has never quite fitted its back to the moral
strain involved in the knowledge that fellow
creatures are starving. In one generation this
strain subsides to an uneasy sense of moral dis-
comfort, in another it rises to a consciousness of
moral obliquity; it has lain at the basis of many
religious communities and social experiments, and
in our own generation is finding extreme expres-
sion 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
sharply challenged. Hungry men asked them-
selves why such a situation should exist, when the
world was capable of producing a sufficient food
supply. We forgot not only that the world itself
had been profoundly modified by the war, but that
the minds which appraise it 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.

To different 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
primitive instinct to feed the hungry, although in
a sense these economic experiments of our own
time are but the counterpart of the religious ex-
periments of another age.

During the first months of so-called peace when
everywhere in Europe the advantage shifted from
the industrial town to the food-producing country,
it seemed reasonable to believe that the existing
governments, from their war experiences in the
increased production and distribution of foods,
might use the training of war to meet the great
underlying demand reasonably and quickly. In
point of fact, during the first year after the war,
five European cabinets fell, due largely to the
grinding poverty resulting from the prolonged
war. Two of these governments fell avowedly
over the sudden rise in the price of bread which
had been subsidized and sold at a fraction of its
cost.

The demand for food was recognized and ac-
knowledged as in a great measure valid, but it was
being met in piecemeal fashion while a much

208 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

needed change in the world's affairs threatened to
occur under the leadership of men driven desper-
ate by hunger. In point of fact, the demand could
only be met adequately if the situation were
treated on an international basisj the nations work-
ing together whole-heartedly to fulfill a world ob-
ligation. If 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
as indispensable.

Certain it is that for two years after the war
the League of Nations was in dire need of an
overmastering motive forcing it to function and to
justify itself to an expectant world, even to endear
itself to its own adherents. As the war had
demonstrated how much stronger is the instinct
of self-defense than any motives for a purely
private good, so one dreamed that the period of
commercial depression following the war might
make clear the necessity for an appeal to the much
wider and profounder instinct responsible for con-
serving 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 hero-
ism and self-sacrifice so lately demanded. The
great principles embodied in the League of Na-
tions, 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, genu-
ine 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 per-
formed such miracles of production in the prosecu-
tion of the war was defined by the British Labor
Party at its annual conference in 1919 as "a world-
government actually in being which should be
made the beginnings of a constructive international
society."

The British Labor Party, therefore, recom-
mended three concrete measures apart from the
revision of the Peace Treaty, as follows:

1. A complete raising of the blockade
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 posi-
tion where they can begin to help themselves.

aio PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

3. Measures for the special relief of children
EVERYWHERE, without regard to the political
allegiance of their parents.

How simple and adequate these three recom-
mendations were and yet how far-reaching in their
consequences ! They would first of all have com-
pelled the promoters of the League to drop the
1 8th century phrases in which diplomatic inter-
course 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 gen-
uine 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 re-
vealed by war, once established, the promoters of
the League would experience "the zeal, the tingle,
the excitement of reality" which the League so
sadly lacked. The promoters of the League had

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." They also ignored the fact that the
stimuli they were utilizing failed to evoke an
adequate response for this advanced form of
human effort.

The adherents of the League often spoke as if
they were defending a too radical document
whereas it probably failed to command wide-
spread confidence because it was not radical
enough, because it clung in practice at least to the
old self-convicted diplomacy. But the common
man in a 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 re-
volutionary 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 anx-
iety the governments responsible for the devasta-
tions of a world war were unaccountably timid in
undertaking restoration on the same scale, and

212 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

persistently hesitated to discharge their obvious
obligations.

It was self-evident that if the League refused
to 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 de-
mand, in its various aspects seemed to afford a
great controlling motive in the world at the pres-
ent moment, as political democracy, as religious
freedom, had moved the world at other times.

There were many occasions during the first year
of the League's existence when the necessity for
such action was fairly forced upon its attention.

At Paris, in May, 1920, when the association of
Red Cross societies was organized, committing
itself to 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 213

of Red Cross Societies replied that it was the
starving man who most readily contracts ajnd
spreads disease, and that only if the Allied gov-
ernments 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
complication, with consequent paralysis of na-
tional 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
this obvious moral obligation and a generous at-
tempt to fulfill it, even to the point if need be of
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 in-
ternational control from the first day of the
armistice, Europe might have escaped the starva-
tion from which she suffered for months. The
League could actually have laid the foundations
of that type of government towards which the
world is striving and in which it is so persistently
experimenting.

The great stumbling block in the way of an
earlier realization of this dream of a League of

214 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

Peace has been what is the crux of its actual sur-
vival now, the difficulty in interpreting it to the
understanding of the common man, grounding it
in his affections, appealing to his love for human
kind. To such men, who after all compose the
bulk of the citizens in every nation participating
in the 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
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 Federa-
tion of Labor declared its readiness to "give a
mighty service in a common effort for all human
kind." So far as the working man in any country
expressed himself, it was always in this direction.
Perhaps it was unfair to expect so much in the
first 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
human emotion which should bring together men
of good-will on both sides of the Atlantic. A
close observer of the Paris Peace Conference had
said that it was an extraordinary fact that starv-
ing Europe was the one subject upon which it had

A FOOD CHALLENGE 215

been impossible to engage the attention of the
"big four" throughout their long deliberations.
Yet in the popular discussions of the functions of
the League the feeding of the people appeared
constantly like an unhappy ghost that would not
down.

While the first year of the League held much
that was discouraging for its advocates, the firs!
meeting of the Assembly convened in Geneva in
November, 1920, resolved certain doubts and re-
moved certain inhibitions from the minds of many
of us. The Assembly demonstrated that after
all it was possible for representatives from the
nations of the earth to get together in order to dis-
cuss 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 in-
creased the moral prestige of the League of Na-
tions that it was reasonable to believe that an ar-
ticulate world-opinion would eventually remove
the treaty entanglements which threatened to
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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

only from their own preferences or even convict-
ions, but also from the social impact upon them,
from the momentum of life itself.

In many ways the first meeting of the Assembly
had been like the beginning of a new era, and it
seemed possible that the public discussion, the
good-will, and the international concern, must
eventually affect the European situation.

During the following year the League of Na-
tions itself inaugurated and carried out many
measures which might be designated as purely
humanitarian. In the "Report to the Second
Assembly of the 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 Gen-
eral International Activities of the League was
the following list :

C. i. The repatriation of prisoners.

C. 2. The relief of Russian refugees.

C. 3. General relief work in Europe.

C. 4. The protection of children.

Under "the measures taken in execution of the
resolutions 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 217

one aspect these activities were all in the nature
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 Na-
tions, had just concluded as we reached Geneva in
August 1921, a conference upon immigration and
possible protective measures which the present
situation demanded. For many years I had been
a Vice President of the American Branch of the
International Association for Labour Legislation
and had learned only too well how difficult it was
to secure equality of conditions for the labor of
immigrants. The most touching interviews I
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,
finally arrives in Manitoba or the Dakotas. He
often finds himself far from consular offices, en-
counters untold difficulties, sometimes falling into
absolute peonage.

It was interesting to have the International

218 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF 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 ap-
plicable 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 gener-
ous hopes for a better world order the Interna-
tional Labour Organization as well as the League
of Nations was encountering all the hazards of a
great social experiment. We could but hope that
the former might gain some backing from the in-
ternational congress, to be held in October, 1921,

A FOOD CHALLENGE 219

of working women, bringing their enthusiasms
and achievements from all parts of the world.

The food challenge was put up fairly and
squarely to the Second meeting of the Assembly
of the League of Nations by the Russian famine
due to the prolonged drought of 1921. A meet-
ing to consider the emergency had been called in
Geneva in August, under the joint auspices of the
International Red Cross and the League of Red
Cross Societies. We were able to send a repre-
sentative to it from our Woman's International
League almost directly from our Third Interna-
tional Congress in Vienna. There was every pos-
sibility for using the dire situation in Russia for
political ends, both by the Soviet Government
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
that any other agency would be pitifully inade-
quate, would receive help directly from many gov-
ernments, united in a mission of good-will. It was
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 govern-
ments would "realize the failure of national co-
ercive power for indispensable ends like food for
the people," they would come to a cooperation
born of the failure of force.

220 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

Dr. Fridjof Nansen, appointed high commis-
sioner at the Red 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
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 re-
vival 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 221

denied. This denial was made at the very mo-
ment when the Russian peasants, in the center of
the famine district, although starving, piously ab-
stained 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 para-
mount 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 re-
flected 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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

could not hope for a manifestation of that re-
ligious impulse which feeds men solely and only
because they are hungry.

A genuine Society of Nations may finally be
evolved by millions of earth's humblest toilers,
whose lives are consumed in securing the daily
needs of existence for themselves and their
families. They go stumbling towards the light of
better international relations, driven forward
because "Man is constantly seeking a new and
finer adjustment between his inner emotional de-
mands and the practical arraiigemehts of the
world in which he lives."

CHAPTER XI.

IN EUROPE AFTER TWO YEARS OF PEACE

OUR Third International Congress was held at
Vienna 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 re-
spects 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 there-
fore were hopeful in the sense that the better in-
ternational relationships which were widely sup-
posed to be attained at the end of the war, were

223

224 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

still in the making. The third Congress was con-
vened in Vienna, which, as we realized, had suf-
fered 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 char-
acterized Europe since the war. Nevertheless
these groups of women were united in one thing.
They all alike had come to realize that every
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 like-
minded people from other countries and to tell
each other how far we had been able to translate
conviction into action. The desire to perform the
office of reconciliation, to bring something of heal-
ing to the confused situation, and to give an im-
pulse towards more normal relations between dif-
fering 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,
that peace missions composed of women of differ-

EUROPE AFTER TWO YEARS OF PEACE 225

ent nations should visit the borders still 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 fulfill the primitive obliga-
tion of keeping their children alive. There was a
certain sternness of attitude concerning political
conditions which so wretchedly affected woman's
age-long business of nurturing children, as if
women had realized as never before what war
means.

In spite of the pressure of these questions the
first public meeting was a memorial to Baroness
von Suttner, whose remarkable book "Ground
Arms" had had 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.

The first business sessions of the Congress con-
cerned themselves with the age-old question of
education. An extraordinarily illuminating di-

226 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

vergence developed from the conflicting experi-
ence of Germany and Austria; speakers from Ger-
many attributed Germany's readiness for war
largely to their own 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 many indications that the delegates
represented nations in various stages of political
and social development. At moments we seemed
to be discussing the same question from the ex-
periences of its decadent end and its promising be-
ginnings, as if the delegates to the Congress repre-
sented the point of view both of the university and
of the kindergarten. Partly Because the meeting
was held in Vienna, and partly because the Inter-
national Secretary, Miss Balch, had recently trav-
elled 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, repre-
sented organized branches of the League. Other
groups were from "minorities" in the newly an-
nexed territories, who frankly came in search of
aid, hoping to gain some international recognition
and support from even so small and unofficial a
Congress as our own. There was an interesting
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 be-
lieved destined to reassert the non-resistant char-
acter 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
representatives of both nations involved. Thus
the Polish and German women agreed on a resolu-
tion about Upper Silesia, the English and Irish
delegates on the Irish question. Touching ad-

228 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

dresses were made for the Armenians, for the
Zionists and, by a colored woman from the United
States, 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: "How can a population, feeling
that it is suffering from injustice, strive to right its
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 center-
ing 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 pre-
paration. Four of our own branches, all of them
in countries recently at war, had made this prom-
ise of non-cooperation in war a test of member-
ship in the national organizations.

This was part of the revolt against the pre-
cautions 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
to three years' imprisonment. A well-known
theological professor in a Swiss University had re-
signed on the ground that he could no longer ex-
pound the doctrines of the New Testament to the
men in his classes. Holland was considering simi-
lar regulations, and even in those countries where
universal military service was forbidden by the
terms of the Peace Treaty, as in Hungary and
Bavaria, the almost military rule temporarily
established in both of them made any form of
peace propaganda extremely dangerous. It was
as if the war spirit itself had to be sustained by
force, as if its own adherents were afraid of any
open discussion of its moral bases and social im-
plications. The military parties seemed more
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 organiza-
tion had been able to do from our Geneva head-
quarters in connection with the League of
Nations. This report was accepted with ap-
proval authorizing a continuance of the same
activity, but there was as usual a minority of the

230 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

delegates who distrusted the imperialistic designs
of the larger nations, and yet another group who
believed that, while a useful agency for many in-
ternational 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 vi-
vendi, allowing the greatest latitude to our Inter-
national 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 in the Treaty as a paramount obligation.
The few Communists who were delegates to
the Congress — the word used in Europe in a some*
what technical sense to designate the members of
the Left in the Socialist Party — were perhaps the
most discouraged people there, because their
movement in Russia and elsewhere had become so
absolutely militaristic. Holding to their pacifist
principles had cost them their standing in their
own party. Although they may have "come
high" to us so far as public opinion was concerned,
no people in the world at that moment so needed
the companionship which pacifist groups might
give them: in the eyes of the bourgeoisie them-
selves, no one could put pacifism into practice
more beneficially for all Europe. These few

EUROPE AFTER TWO YEARS OF PEACE 231

Communist delegates were for the most part
reasonable, but all of them were profoundly dis-
couraged.

The resolution which excited the most comment
in the press, and which apparently aroused that
white heat of interest attaching to any discussion,
however remote, of property privileges, was in-
troduced by a group who felt that, as we constantly
urged the revolutionist to pacific methods and de-
nounced violence between the classes as we did be-
tween 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
represented in the Congress. The momentary
sense of panic aroused by this reasonable discus-
sion, 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
Russian Bolshevists threatening to enforce a
theory regardless of "consent." At any rate, a
European public found it hard to believe that any-
thing even remotely connected with private
property could be discussed upon its merits and

232 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

was convinced that the subject jnust have been in-
troduced either by agents provocateurs, or by pro-
pagandists paid with Russian money. The war
propaganda had demonstrated to the world how
possible it is "to put over" an opinion if enough
ability and money are expended and Europeans
thought they had learned to detect it. We un-
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 com-
plete admiration of the delegates as nothing else
did. 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
organized an association of those who had been
imprisoned in Germany, civilians as well as re-
turned Belgian soldiers, that they might feed Ger-
man and Austrian children. She reported to the
Congress that the association had received 2,000
of these children as guests in Belgium. She gave
this information incidentally in the speech she was
making to thank the various nations represented
there for what they had done for the relief of her

EUROPE AFTER TWO YEARS OF PEACE 233

own compatriots. , This Belgian woman was,
typical of many women who had touched bottom
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,
business, domestic and intellectual life, 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 had been piteously reduced by priva-
tions. The professional and artistic people had
gradually lowered their standard of living to that
below the health line. In addition the insolvency
threatened to destroy the collective resources of
culture and education: everywhere we were told
that there was no money to buy books and periodi-
cals for long-established libraries, that schools
were closing, that orchestras were forced to dis-
band. The students' feeding in various Universi-
ties 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. We naturally saw most of
the American Relief Administration established
by Mr. Hoover, and of the Friends' Service Com-
mittee, 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
live at the expense of food for the young. The
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
ways although in spite of these united efforts only
21 children out of a 100 were as yet approxi-
mately normal. It was as if the world, aghast at
what had happened to these children, was putting

EUROPE AFTER TWO YEARS OF PEACE 235

into the situation all the inventiveness and resource
that human compassion could devise. Out of it
was developing what might prove to be a 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 every-
where 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
being set by Professor Cizek. That this new
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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

ways the inevitable conclusion, although stated
with restraint, that the Peace Treaty had placed
Austria in an impossible position.

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 re-
ceived 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 mem-
bers of an international body. This public
hospitality, in which women officials took such a
natural and reasonable place, was in marked con-
trast to my former experience in Austria. In
1913 I had attended the Suffrage Meeting in
Vienna presided over by the mother of the present
President of the Austrian Republic. At that time
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 twenty-
three as members of the City Council. In the face

EUROPE AFTER TWO YEARS OF PEACE 237

of these rapid changes, who would venture to say
that peace or any other unpopular cause, was
hopeless. Even a new basis for bread peace
seemed not so remote when the large audience,
containing many Austrian officials, listened with
profound interest to a Frenchwoman, Mile.
Melin, who, although her devastated home was
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-
gress, when again in the City Hall she addressed
an audience of wounded soldiers who applauded
to the echo this Frenchwoman telling them there
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 differ-
ent countries, the largest number from Great
Britain. The lectures, in English, French and
German, were delivered by men and women from
a dozen nations on the psychological, the eco-
nomic, the historic and biological causes of war.
They were provocative of thought and discussion
in the class room itself and later among the eager
students, who constantly arranged special meet-
ings, one 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

238 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

vitality and energy, as of a fresh growth push-
ing through old traditions. The Movement of
Youth represented by many of the German stu-
dents was making a fresh demand upon life for
reality and simplicity which was in strange con-
trast 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 be-
coming stronger than the latter. A discussion at
the Vienna Congress brought support to this
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 life.

Was it not rather that youth, "fashioning the
glory of the years to be," was transforming prop-
erty ! 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 Agri-
culture 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-
ther. Everywhere there was acquiescence if not
a "consent" to the housing arrangements which
practically all the. cities had made ; conservative
women told us with a certain pride of what they
had done to conform to the municipal regulations
in making room for other families within their
houses, and that it was "not so bad." Sometimes
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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

this impulse gradually subside into a "suppressed
desire," forming the basis of futile and disturbing
social unrest, would it be seized by the doctrin-
aires who were already trading so largely upon the
normal human impulses exaggerated by war, or
would it finally be captured by the friends of man-
kind? Could not this impulse to nurture the
wretched be canalized and directed by enlarged
governmental agencies, and was not that the prob-
lem before the statesmen of Europe?

The conditions in Southeastern Europe as we
met them that hot summer of 1921 might well
challenge the highest statesmanship. We saw
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 na-
tion like the barbed wire entanglements around a
concentration camp." A covert war was being
carried on by the use of import duties and protect-
ive 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 241

outgrowth of the Peace Conference itself. 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,
especially between successsion States of the former
Austrian Empire with their inherited oppressions
and grievances. Yet we longed for a Customs
Union, a Pax Economica for these new nations,
who failed to see that "the price of nationality is
a workable internationalism, otherwise it is
doomed so far as the smaller states are con-
cerned."

We arrived in Europe in the midst of the pro-
longed discussion as to the amount of the "repara-
tions" to be paid by Germany. This discussion
by the Supreme Council had f ocussed more power-
fully 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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

We had established our own bakery in Vienna,
that delegates might not "eat bread away from the
Viennese," and special food arrangements had
been made for our students in Salzburg. Yet
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 pro-
ducts. The under-nourished students who filled
the streets of the music-loving city during the
Mozart week, which was celebrated by daily con-
certs during the term of our School, were a silent
reproach to one's prosperity. We became im-
patient with the long-delayed action on the report
of the Economic Commission sent to study
Austria's needs, and felt that food and raw ma-
terials 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
completely Norman Angell's theory of the futility
of war. As he stated in "The Fruits of Victory,"
published at that time; "The continent as a
whole has the same soil and natural resources and
technical knowledge as when it fed its population,
but there is suffering and want on every hand.
War psychology is fatal to social living. 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 TWO YEARS OF PEACE 243

the cooperation by which alone wealth can be pro-
duced and life maintained."

The situation therefore resolves itself into the
dominance of ideas, into the temper of mind which
makes war possible. Even the pro-war news-
papers were then recognizing it. A leading
journal, a consistent apologist for the great war,
had written: "Europe will never recover com-
posure and peace, nor can an acceptable and work-
able compromise be achieved, until the conse-
quences of the method of coercion are understood
and the method itself abandoned in the interest
of a method of consent."

And so we came back to what our own organiza-
tion was 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 ineffectual and vague, but after all the ac-
tivities of life can be changed in no other way
than by changing the current ideas upon which it
is conducted.

The members of the Woman's International
League for Peace and Freedom had certainly
learned from their experience during the war that
widely accepted ideas can be both dominating and
all powerful. But we still believed it possible to
modify, to direct and ultimately to change current
ideas, not only through discussion and careful pre-

244 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

sentation of facts, but also through the propa-
ganda of the deed.

In accord with the latter, one German section,
after our Congress in Vienna had sent a group of
women into Upper Silesia, which at that time was
filled with ardent nationalists both for Germany
and Poland, each hotly presenting the claims of his
own side. The group of women entered the con-
tested territory, not to promote either national
claim but to counsel confidence in the good inten-
tions of those making the final decision; to preach
that freedom of exchange in coal or other com-
modities is more basic to economic life than any
detail of political boundaries; to abate the hyper-
nationalistic feeling which was responsible for
actual warfare between the non-contending
peoples.

In fact it seemed to me during that summer as I
visited one National Section after another, that
all of our members in their daily walk and con-
versation had been bearing unequivocal testimony
against war and its methods. This impression
was equally vivid at the public meeting at Buda-
pest where Vilma Glucklich presided sitting next
to a police officer; as it was later at a meeting in
London where Mrs. Swanwick, occupying the plat-
form with a distinguished economist, brilliantly
inaugurated a frank discussion of post-war con-
ditions in Europe.

EUROPE AFTER TWO YEARS OF PEACE 245

The 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 office had been able to do in that direc-
tion. 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 ques-
tions in the interest of many nations, not of any
particular one. They were "paid to think inter-
nationally," as a member of the Secretariat put it.
And because they were really thinking and not
merely falling into mere diplomatic discussion, we
had a 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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

spirited women led by the brilliant Frau Yella
Hertzka who had never during the long days of
war or the ensuing peace hesitated to assert that
war could achieve nothing.

And although we were so near to the great war
with its millions of dead and its starved survivors,
we had ventured at the very opening of the Con-
gress to assert that war is not a natural activity
for mankind, that large masses of men should
fight against other large masses is abnormal, both
from the biological and ethical point of view. We
stated that it is a natural tendency of men to come
into friendly relationships with ever larger and
larger groups, and to live constantly a more ex-
tended life. It required no courage to predict
that the endless desire of men would at last assert
itself, 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 organiza-
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 advocat-
ing limitations of armaments and many of them
had united with other public bodies in establish-
ing headquarters in Washington from which in-
formation and propaganda were constantly is-
sued.

Seldom had any public movement received more
universal support from American women; an esti-
mate issued by the National League of Women
Voters stated that more than a million communi-
cations had been sent to Washington by individu-
als 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. Many of our Na-
tional Sections in their respective capitals had held

247

248 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

public meetings on Nov. nth advocating disarma-
ment and those National Sections whose govern-
ments were represented at Washington had sent
"manifestos" to their own Commissioners in ad-
dition to the one sent on behalf of the Interna-
tional 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 advo-
cated 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.

The disposition to discuss genuine world prob-
lems in a spirit of frankness and good will, in
marked contrast to traditional international gath-
erings, led to a wide-spread hope that the Con-
ference had inaugurated a precedent that might
result in 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 League of Nations.
It was also encouraging that the Conference ex-
hibited an acute consciousness of the hideous state

AN AFTER WORD 249

of a world facing starvation smcl industrial con-
fusion. The strong public movement developed
during its sessions for the immediate calling of
an international conference to consider Economic
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 con-
scious of the desperate need of food for millions
of the starving Russians. But whether I was
serving on a committee to secure funds, lecturing
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 inter-
national affairs. An American Quaker who came
directly from the famine district in Samara told
us of the desperate people living on powdered
grass and roots cooked with the hoofs of horses
that it might stick together in the 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
farm machinery left on the roadside by desperate
peasants who could drag it with them no farther

250 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

in their dreary search for food, of the possible
abandonment of a large acreage which had for
years supplied millions of people with bread. It
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 recog-
nized 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 remark-
able 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:

"But I know that I believe so firmly in this
great World at Peace 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, as the moods
may happen before I die."

APPENDIX

WOMEN'S INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE FOR PEACE
AND FREEODM

International Headquarters, 6, rue du Vieux-
College, Geneva, Switzerland.

Imagine that you are in Geneva, that you have
left 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 IS THIS LEAGUE?

It is a 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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

educating the coming generations to help to real-
ize these principles.

The League is made up of people who believe
that we are not 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. We believe that
experience condemns force as a self defeating
weapon although men are still so disposed to
turn to it in education, in dealing with crime,
in effecting or preventing social changes, and
above all in carrying out national policies. We
believe that new methods, free from, violence,
must be worked out for ending abuses and for
undoing wrongs, as well as for achieving positive
ends.

CONGRESS AND SUMMER SCHOOLS

What 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 sec-
ond at Zurich in 1919, the last at Vienna in 1921.
A very successful international Summer School
was held at Salzburg in August, 1921.

National Sections. The addresses of our Sec-
tions— organized national branches or corre-
spondents— are as follows:

APPENDIX

255

Austria: Frau Yella Hertzka, Hofburg,

Michaelertor, Wien I.

Australia : Miss Eleanor M. Moore, 40 Eve-

lina Rd., Toorak, Melbourne.
Mrs. H. S. Bayley, "Runny-
mede," Newton near Hobart,
Tasmania.

Mrs. E. A. Guy, Rockhampton,
Queensland.

Bulgaria: Mme. Anna Theodorova, Obo-

richte 26, Sofia.

Mme. Jenny Dojilowa Patteff,
Bourgas.

Canada: Mrs. Harriet Dunlop Prenter, 92

Westminster Avenue, Toronto.

Denmark: Miss Thora Daugaard, Danske

Kvinders Fredsbureau, Kompag-
nistraede 2, Copenhagen.

Finland: Miss Annie Furuhjelm, 14 Ka-

sarngaten, Helsingfors.

France : Mme. Gabrielle Duchene, 10 Ave.

de Tokio, Paris.

Germany: Frl. Lida Gustava Heymann, 12

Kaulbachstr, Miinchen.

Gr. Britain: Mrs. H. M. Swanwick, 55 Gower
St., London W. C. i.

Greece: Mme. Olga Bellini, c/o Mme.

Parren, 44 rue Epire, Athene.

Hungary: Miss Vilma Gliicklich, 41 Katona

Joszef ut, Budapest V.

Ireland: Miss Louie Bennett, 39 Harcourt

St., Dublin.

Italy: Signora Rosa Genoni, 6 Via Kra-

mer, Milan.

256 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR

Netherlands :

New Zealand:
Norway :
Poland:
Sweden :
Switzerland :
Ukraine :
U.S.A.:

Belgium :
Czecho-Slov. :

Japan :

Mexico :

Mme. Cor. Ramondt-Hirsch-
mann, 5 Valeriusplein, Amster-
dam.

Mrs. E. Gibson, 56 St. Mary's
Rd., Auckland.

Miss Martha Larsen, Sondre
Huseby, Skoien, pr. Kristiania.
Mme. Daszynska-Golinska,
Wspelna79/7, Warsaw.
Miss Matilde Widegren, Sibyl-
legatan 59, Stockholm.
Mme. Clara Ragaz, 68 Gloriastr,
Zurich.

Mile. Dr. N. Surowzowa, Chi-
manistr, 29/4, Wien XIX.
Mrs. George Odell, 1623 H St.,
\Yashington, D. C.
Addresses of correspondents and
corresponding societies.
Mile. Lucie Dejardin, 48 rue St.
Julienne, Liege.

Mme. Kovarova-Machova, Pado-
kalska 1973, Prague II.
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.
Mrs. George D. Shadbourne, Jr.,
La Mishad Apartment, 1875
Sacramento St., San Francisco,
Cal.

APPENDIX 257

Miss Elena Landazuri, 3* Cor-
doba 77, Mexico City.

Peru: Miss Dora Mayer, Loreto altos

45, Callao.

Roumania: Mme. Emilian, 59 rue Doro-
bantzilor, Bukarest.

Jugo-Slavia: Mme. Dedier, Ministere de Po-
litique Sociale, Belgrade.
Dr. Zdenka Smrekar, Kumicic ut,
III., Zagreb.

Mme. Aloysia Stebi, Dunajska
Cesta 25> Ljubljana.