LIBKAKY 
 
 mmsiJ^ Of CALiFUKi^m 
 
 RIVERSIDE
 
 The Peace Movement 
 in America 
 
 A facsimile reprint collection 
 
 "Peace' 
 
 Jerome S. Ozer, Publisher 
 1972
 
 Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 75-137524 
 
 This edition is reprinted from a copy in the collection of The Public Library 
 of Newark, New Jersey 
 
 Manufactured in the United States of America
 
 PEACE AND BREAD 
 
 ^ IN TIME OF WAR 
 
 By 
 
 JANE ADDAMS 
 
 il5tto ^et^ 
 
 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.
 
 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
 
 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 p^CE 
 
 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 gi 
 
 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 
 
 ix
 
 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 19 14 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 19 14 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 19 14, 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, 19 15, 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 
 
 II. 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
 
 10 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 19 15, 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 ii 
 
 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 19 15, 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, 19 15, 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 chffs 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. 
 
 Whether 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 thq 
 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
 
 i6 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR 
 
 women from the neutral countries to the Premier 
 and Minister of Foreign Affairs of each of the 
 belHgerent 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, 
 19 1 5, 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. AUetta 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 
 dn the government to act. 
 
 "The excruciating burden of responslbilfty 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, 19 16. 
 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 19 16, 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 
 Republicians 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 
 histor)', 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 191 6, 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 19 15, 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 19 15 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 tlie 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 20th 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- 
 heved, 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, 19 16, 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, 19 16, 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, 191 6, 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, 19 16, 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 19 17, 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 19 15 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 afive 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 lOO, 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, 19 15. 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 
 dibJiouer 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 hberal 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 19 14, 
 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, 191 6, 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, 19 16, 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, 19 14, 
 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 poliq^ 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 191 6 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, 19 16, 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 19 15 and had set 
 up a military government, including a strict mili- 
 tary censorship. All sorts of stories were reach- 
 ing the oflice 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, 191 6, 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, 19 16, 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-
 
 PRESIDENT WILSON'S POLICIES 57 
 
 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 111 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, 19 17, 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, 19 15, 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, 
 19 15, 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 offi- 
 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-
 
 6o 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, 19 1 7, 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
 
 PRESIDENT WILSON'S POLICIES 6i 
 
 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 ptople. 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
 
 PRESIDENT WILSON'S POLICIES 65 
 
 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 mstitutions 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, 19 19, what he had said in 
 January, 19 17, — "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, 19 19, 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 Eraser'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 8i 
 
 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 three 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 19 16, 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 19 17: 
 "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 19 16-17 I' P^^- 
 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
 
 go 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 19 16-17 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 
 
 91
 
 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 191 1. 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 191 5, 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 their 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 19 17, 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 19 17 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,
 
 lOO 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 loi 
 
 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 Alhed 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 1 8 15, at the Peace Conference follow- 
 ing the Napoleonic Wars, for "An AU-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 19 18. 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-
 
 io6 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR 
 
 iations 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!
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 AFTER WAR WAS DECLARED. 
 
 The first meeting of our national Board, con- 
 vened after the declaration of war, was in Octo- 
 ber, 19 1 7, 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 opln*
 
 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
 
 no 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 long 
 since abandoned any such hope, but because we 
 longed actually to modify the headlong course of 
 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
 
 112 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
 
 114 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-
 
 AFTER WAR WAS DECLARED 115 
 
 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
 
 ii8 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
 
 I20 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 
 flag." 
 
 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, 19 19. 
 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 under 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 19 17 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 19 15, 
 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! 
 
 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 19 19, 
 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 19 17. 
 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 atmosphere" 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 United States had entered the war 
 there began to appear great divergence among 
 the many types of pacifists, 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, i' 
 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- t 
 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, that militarism might be ■ 
 used as an instrument for advanced social ends. : 
 Such justifications had their lure and one found i: 
 old pacifist friends on all the war boards and I 
 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 19 15, or having written a book on 
 Newer Ideals of Peace in 191 1 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, 19 1 5, 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 i 
 Chicago Health Department had lasted for many i 
 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 \i 
 and deliberate attempt at misrepresentation on 1? 
 the part of newspapers of all shades of opinion ii< 
 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 19 15, 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-
 
 136 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 Ruskln'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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR 
 
 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.
 
 I40 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 Tts 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 such 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
 
 144 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 19 15 and again in 19 19 than the freedom 
 of speech permitted there. 
 
 We also read with a curious eagerness the stead- 
 ily increasing number of books published from 
 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 Rolland, 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- 
 erty instinct. No other species save ants, who also 
 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 
 hunter 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; 
 In the biological struggle, the variety which grows 
 a thicker coat survives the winter while the other 
 variety freezes to extinction, but if 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-
 
 148 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 jfind 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
 
 I50 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR 
 
 of the doctrinnalre, 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 doctrinnalre, 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 
 
 It therefore came about that ability to hold out 
 against mass suggestion, to honestly differ from 
 the convictions and enthusiasms of one's best 
 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 19 15, "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 19 15, 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 19 15, 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 18 15 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, 19 19 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 
 wasHnally 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, 19 15, the Executive Committee of 
 the Woman's International Committee for Per- 
 manent 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-
 
 i6o 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 1 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 i6i 
 
 "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-
 
 1 62 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-soldlers 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-
 
 i64 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 oflicials, 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-
 
 i66 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR 
 
 ganization was changed to "Woman's Interna- 
 tional League for Peace and Freedom" and Ge- 
 neva, as the seat of the League of 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 whea^ 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, 19 19: "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.
 
 i68 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. .if 
 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 ti 
 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-i 
 wreck of a nation and they had no time for resent- ij
 
 IN EUROPE DURING THE ARMISTICE 169 
 
 merits. 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-
 
 I70 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 »nd 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 19 15 was in 
 marked contrast to my impressions received thirty- 
 four years earlier, in 1885. 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 most strik- 
 ing characteristic of all these nationalistic move- 
 ments had been their burning humanitarianism, 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 19 19 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 mediasval 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 
 
 THE AFTERMATH OF WAR 
 
 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. L 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-
 
 i8o 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 i8i 
 
 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
 
 1 84 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 
 1st, 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
 
 i86 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR 
 
 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 in- 
 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 
 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 
 "own recognizance" In order to lessen the fearful 
 risks, the prisoners were then faced with the neces- 
 sity for earning enough money for lodging and 
 breakfast, before the long day in court began. 
 Fortunately the judge allowed them a dinner and a 
 supper at the expense of the government. Some 
 of us started a "milk fund" for those who were
 
 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 
 
 slans 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 war had made obvious 
 the sheer inability of the world to prevent terror 
 and misery. It had been a great revelation of 
 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 un- 
 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 19 1 5 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 
 Hberal 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 19 19, their clear statement 
 of a League of Nations program brought to their
 
 196 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR 
 
 banner many of the doubtful, myself among 
 them. 
 
 The later winter and spring of 19 19 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
 
 198 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 
 
 stractlon 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 sajtisfaction 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 149th 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.
 
 2o6 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
 
 2o8 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 basis_, 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 prof ounder 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, utihzing 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 1 9 1 9 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.
 
 2IO 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 and 
 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 7th, 192 1, 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 Liternational Labor Organization, from 
 the first such a hopeful part of the League of Na- 
 tions, had just concluded as we reached Geneva in 
 August 1 92 1, 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
 
 2i8 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, 192 1,
 
 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 192 1. 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 rehef. 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 arrafigements of the 
 world in which he lives."
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 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 19 15, 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 19 19 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; spealcers 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 pafrties 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 WAIi 
 
 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 must 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, 19 15, and worked 
 there in one camp after another, until, developing 
 tuberculosis, she was invalided to Switzerland in 
 July, 19 18. 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 : ever}'where 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 PEACE AND BREAD IN TIME OF WAR 
 
 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 lOO 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
 
 EUROPE AFTER TWO YEARS OF PEACE 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 192 1 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 v/as 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 their 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 focussed 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 ?ction, 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 192 1, 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 BF^EAD 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, 192 1, 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 and 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 19 15, the sec- 
 ond at Zurich in 19 19, the last at Vienna in 192 1. 
 A very successful international Summer School 
 was held at Salzburg in August, 192 1, 
 
 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: Mme. Cor. Ramondt-Hirsch- 
 mann, 5 Valeriusplein, Amster- 
 dam. 
 
 New Zealand: Mrs. E. Gibson, 56 St. Mary's 
 Rd., Auckland. 
 
 Norway: Miss Martha Larsen, Sondre 
 
 Huseby, Skoien, pr. Kristiania. 
 
 Poland: Mme. Daszynska-Golinska, 
 
 Wspelna79/7, Warsaw. 
 
 Sweden: Miss Matilde Widegren, Sibyl- 
 
 legatan 59, Stockholm. 
 
 Switzerland: Mme. Clara Ragaz, 68 Gloriastr, 
 Zurich. 
 
 Ukraine : Mile. Dr. N. Surowzowa, Chi- 
 
 manistr, 29/4, Wien XIX. 
 
 U. S. A.: Mrs. George Odell, 1623 H St., 
 
 iWashington, D. C. 
 Addresses of correspondents and 
 corresponding societies. 
 
 Belgium: Mile. Lucie Dejardin, 48 rue St. 
 
 Julienne, Liege. 
 
 Czecho-Slov. : Mme. Kovarova-Machova, Pado- 
 kalska 1973, Prague II. 
 Mme. Pavla Moudra, Neveklov. 
 
 Japan: Mr. Isamu Kawakami, Corres- 
 
 pondence and Publicity Bureau, 
 10 Omote Sarugaku Cho Kanda, 
 Tokyo. 
 
 Miss Tano Jodai, Jap. Women's 
 University Kaishikawa, Tokyo. 
 
 Mexico: Mrs. George D. Shadbourne, Jr., 
 
 La Mishad Apartment, 1875 
 Sacramento St., San Francisco, 
 Cal.
 
 APPENDIX 257 
 
 Miss Elena Landazurl, 3a Cor- 
 doba 77, Mexico City. 
 
 Peru: Miss Dora Mayer, Loreto altos 
 
 45, Callao. 
 
 Roumania: Mme. Emillan, 59 rue Doro- 
 
 bantzilor, Bukarest. 
 
 Jugo-Slavia: Mme. Dedler, Minlstere de Po- 
 litique Soclale, Belgrade. 
 Dr. Zdenka Smrekar, Kumlcic ut, 
 III., Zagreb. 
 
 Mme. Aloysla Stebi, Dunajska 
 Cesta 25, Ljubljana.
 
 A3
 
 
 DATE DUE 
 
 
 MAY 15 
 
 \m 
 
 
 
 IfCR ?^f 
 
 i ^ ■'SfiH 
 
 
 
 
 
 (ilQ^ 
 
 
 M m 
 
 iZ7m 
 
 
 
 ri,;:> 
 
 
 
 
 i."-.'-> 
 
 '■^.cr- 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 CAVLORO 
 
 
 
 PKINTEDIN US A.
 
 MM,,, ,,,,,,i,,,,i,Miiiiiniinii||||||j||||||||||||| 
 
 AA 001 310 947 5 
 
 ■■■■■I 
 
 1210 00498 4801