The Growth of Peace Principles, and Methods of Propagating Them

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Tue Growrts or Peace Princires,
—© AND ©—
THE METHODS OF PROPAGATING ‘THEM.
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“Knowledge and wisdom, far from being one,

. Have oftimes no connection,—

Knowledge dwells: in heads replete with pa ee of other men,
Wisdom in minds conversant with their own.”

—Se—

The woman of to-day needs. both iiuil odes and wisdom, and
this the Council is designed to develop. It must be a source of
congratulation to all women that the Council idea has so broad-
ened as to take into its fold the Jew and the Gentile; Catholic
and Protestant; the affiliators with the Grand Army of the
Republic; the Peace Union and the Red Cross.

The Peace Question, like the Woman Question, the Temper-
ance Question, and Social Purity, is a subject of education more
largely than of legislation ; although each needs the other to be

‘effective. | Thus the dl culture and peaceful temperament of

a people may lead them to prefer arbitration to war; while the
ratification of a Treaty of Peace and Arbitration by ote
may of itself become a source of education to the people of both
the powers instrumental in its ratification.

The history of mankind has been one of war from the Ase
of Abel in the Garden of Eden until the present time; and,
strangely enough, the religious wars of the past, so apnteey to
the spirit of Christ and his teachings, have been the bitterést
and most prolonged.

Mahomet, the founder of Islam and prophet of Moslem in the
sixth century, thought to convert his fellows to his religious
creed by making war upon them, ignoring the fact that the

essential element of religion is love. One of the principal com-

mandments contained 1 in the Koran is “War against the infidel ;

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and the infidel has been in all ages, the man who does not
believe as we do.” Orthodoxy is my doxy; heterodoxy is your
doxy.

In the twelfth century the war against heretics, and the hor-
rors of the Inquisition in Egland, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy,
the Netherlands and Austria, and later in South America,
intended to be in the interest of religion, and instigated by the
Church, but ostensibly in the name of the State, when Church
and State were virtually one, caused the death of millions of
professed Christians, whose tenets of creed did not precisely agree
with those of their persecutors, thirty thousand of whom are
supposed to have suffered death in the Old Castle Stein at Ant-
werp alone under the directions of Philip of Spain. The old
Castle, with its grim, dark, underground dungeons, and myste-
rious subterranean passages, with the rack and thumb-screws,
and flesh hooks, with which the dying prayers of the early
Christians were stifled, is now converted into a Museum, with
the Old Judgment Chair, from the sentences of which there was

no appeal, as one of its chief attractions. During the reign of |

terror, which succeeded the horrid edicts of the Inquisition,
wives testified against their husbands, and husbands against
their Wives ; parents against their children, and children against
their parents; until not only families, but communities were
dismembered, commerce ruined, and trade stagnated. Witch-
craftry in New England was one of the last expiring throes of
that dread heresy, more heretical than the heretic.

The slaughter of five thousand Huguenots in Paris and thirty
thousand in the Provinces in the sixteenth century by order of
Charles IX, the young King of France, and said to have been
instigated by his mother, usek Gathers was the result of a
religious war between Catholicism and Protestantism, in which
the former prevailed. In the three yer of war which followed
the Edict of Nantes, France is said to have on nearly one mil-
lion of inhabitants. |

The Thirty Years’ War in England dasee. the same century -

had its origin in the same religious dissensions and jealousies
_ between the same religious bodies, and ended in the triumph of
Protestantism, but it created a bitterness between Catholics and

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Protestants ; between Englishmen and Frenchmen, which two

hundred years of peace have failed to eradicate, and which has
recently found an outcropping in our own country in the birth

of the A. P. A. It is the real cause of the lack of success of the.
movement for Home roe in Ireland. But sree cate is not

religion. Religion is “peace on earth, good will to men.’

The Franco-Prussian War, which broke out in 1870-71, in-
cited by the ambition of Napoleon III and Eugenia, the latter
of whom said: “this is my war,” resulted in the cession of
Alsace and Lorraine to Germany, and constitutes the principal
menace to-day of the peace of Europe. That war, besides the

loss of territory and of treasure, cost France five million mil-,
-lards in money and five hundred thousand men. It did more;
it engendered a hatred between Frenchmen and Germans that

another century will not eradicate.

Our own internecine war, known as the War of the Rebellion,
cost our nation one million of men and’ three billions dollars in
money, besides the waste of valuable records and countless
treasure, $145,000,000 yearly in pensions, laid the foundation
of the countless financial disasters of 1895, and created sectional
prejudices and hatreds that will not entirely die out during the
next fifty years. |

The writers of war histories keep up this race and sectional
prejudice by writing each one from his own party standpoint,
lauding even the derents of his countrymen until they seem like
victories ; suppressing many facts, and belittling the strength,
prowess, courage and magnanimity of his opponents, while he
too often colors and magnifies the usually very insignificant
cause of the war itself. It is doubtful if a candid person, en-
tirely unacquainted with the facts, if such a thing can be sup-
posed, should read English history with an account of the seven
years’ war of the Revolution, and then read our American his-

tory of the same events, that he would believe that they related |

to precisely the same difficuities, and recounted the same battles
on the same soil; or if we come down to the Franco-Prussian
War, and read it from the German, and then from the French
standpoint ; or if he should read the history of our own late War
of the Rebellion, with the highly colored but antagonistic views


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of the North and the South, that a fair-minded reader would:
suppose that they were one and the same succession of events.

But we do not stop by putting these highly colored and erro-
neous histories into our libraries for the edification and instruc-

tion of mature readers who know and think; but with all of :

their exaggerations and animosities they are too often condensed
into school books for the instruction of the young, who imbibe
the hatreds and prejudices of ourselves and of our ancestors. In
these histories the prowess accorded, and the adulation lavished
upon the conquering hero is calculated to influence the youthful
mind to like deeds of daring, until he, too, “burns to wear a
uniform, hear drums, and see a battle,” believing that the Army
or the Navy are the only sure roads to preferment, and to. fame

and fortune. So the youth enlists to repent of the hardships

and tedium of army life at his leisure, and is only disenchanted
when he falls on the battle-field or returns to his home a hope-
less cripple for life. We have ten statues to the soldier where
we have not one to the philanthropist. The organization of
boys’ brigades fosters this spirit; destroys in him reaper for
human life, until to take it seems easy.

Thus our knowledge of history becomes distorted; the war
spirit is kept up, rendering another war imminent on the slight-
est provocation, while the real sentiments of our enemies are
never known to us.

A recital of its wars constitutes the largest portion of the his-

tory of Christian Nations; while the strides that it has made in
commerce, in manufactures, and the arts, constitute the least.
With this idea in view Mr. George Pitt, of England, has recently
written a book entitled “A History of England with Her Wars

Left Out,” and has succeeded in getting in a compact little book |

of 114 pages all that there has been important in English his-
tory for the past three hundred years.

The love of home and country are undoubtedly meritorious
attributes, and self-sacrifice for country has always been held in
high esteem, but it is but another form of self-love, and it is
quite possible to make this love not only excessive, but unjust.
There is another and a higher love—the great love of humanity,
of peace, of justice and equality—that should be taught to our

rent Sten ERNIE a aR POAC ERREe RATE iE A EEE OR

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youth as well. It has been well said that to die for one’s coun-

try has been ey considered the highest order of patriotism ;
but to live for one’s country is Hecidedlly more patriotic and
profitable.

In these latter days we have auother potent iafluenee at wore
to foment war, and that is the war correspondent. During the
thirty years of peace since our late civil war we have had sev-
eral blood-curdling wars on paper, including the Italian im-
broglio, the Itata affair, the Chilean entanglement, the Sioux
outbreak, the Hawaian matter, etc., etc., and it is rather painful
to see the war spirit, after so many years of peace, boiling in
the minds of our young men, and so many old men anxiously
encouraging an actual passage at arms in matters too trivial to
confer either gloty or advantage on us as a nation, if such a
thing were desirable in any event. By our Constitution we are
pledged to neutrality, and cannot commit any overt act. We
do not need to increase our territory, and have publicly declared

- through the Pan-American Congress that the right of conquest

does not exist. So says the International Peace Congress and
the Parliamentary Conference. We have gone further. In
pursuance of the closing resolution of that Congress, in April,
1890, the grandest and most unique of its kind in the history of
the world, and in conformity with the Sherman Joint Resolu-
tion passed the same year, the United States, in 1892, invited
the nations of the world, and particularly all of those with whom
we are in treaty relations, to join with us in a series of perma-
nent Treaties of Arbitration, and the invitation has been ac-
cepted by Switzerland, Denmark and Great Britain.

To ratify such a treaty between the United States and Great
Britain, the Hon. Wm. Randal Cremer has recently visited our

Shores, bearing a petition to the President and the Congress of

the United States, signed by 354 members of the British House _
of Commons, and assuring us that Her Majesty’s Ministry are
largely in favor of the measure. In doing this Mr. Cremer has
ignored that old threadbare trick of so-called diplomacy, which
is always shifting responsibility by saying, let the other party
make the overtures, and has had the moral courage to come to
request that our Government take action in this very important


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matter: I am sorry to know that we have some legislators.

without culture sufficient to appreciate his motives, or the bless-

ings that such a permanent state of international peace would -

give, as it would be sure to be followed with many other similar

treaties with other nations, and thus lend strength enough to

each to begin.a system of gradual disarmament, that would at
once lighten the burdens on the laboring and producing classes
of Europe, and elevate womanhood by drawing largely the
laboring woman from the field to the home, while the common
soldier, whose services would no longer be required on the bat-
tle-field or the frontier, could take her place on the farm and in
the work-shop, and thus the great idle army of consumers would
be converted into an army of producers, so much urged by our
esteemed Parisian contemporary, Madame Gréiss Traut. — As it
is, all Europe is bristling with bayonets, while the budgets of
her several Parliaments are loaded with appropriations for the
increase of the Army and the Navy, and her laboring men and
women are staggering under a taxation greater than they can
bear, with a war cloud always imminent, and a threat of dire
disaster from one quarter or another, to the disquiet of rest and
work. Mr. Cremer’s petition was followed by a resolution in
Congress by the Hon. Wm. J. Coombs of New York, backed by
the petitions of 5,000 reputable people, responding from Maine
to California. — | | ih | |

Even our own Congress, without a speck of a war cloud, or
any danger of one, on our frontier, unless we provoke one by
uncalled-for meddling, are continuously making appropriations
for war ships to strengthen our Navy, in order to protect long
stretches of sea coast, that no nation has the remotest idea of
attacking, or to protect our foreign commerce, which has recently
grown so small that one would need a microscope to discover it.
But let it not be forgotten that these large naval appropriations

furnish very good jobs for a certain few, who are in the ring, -

and that. they must of a necessity be manned before they can be
Jaunched; otherwise there would be no positions for the young
‘men who annually graduate at Annapolis ; and little or no glory
(as he thinks) for the Secretary of the Navy, who is usually
anxious to maghify. himself and his office... And so.the money of










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the people is spent for a costly vessel that will usually stand the
strain of one peaceful cruise at sea, providing there are no

storms, and then go to the dry dock for repairs. It were far

better if these ships were made commercial ships, that as
might.in some way bless mankind.

But these appropriations, so far as our own country is con-

cerned, are not only useless, but positively harmful, for they at
once alarm our Huropean friends, and incite them to a greater
increase of their military and naval appropriations.
_ The Washington Post.of February 16, 1895, had an article
headed “‘The Nation Needs Battle Ships; Our Navy Should be
Prepared for Any Emergency,” and then went on to state that
the present appropriation bill authorizes the construction by
contract of three seagoing coast line battle ships of three thous-
and tons each, to cost not less than $4,000,000 each, exclusive
of armaments, and nine new torpedo boats, from one hundred to
two hundred tons, to cost $170,000, and three additional tor-
pedo boats for the Brooklyn, Norfolk and Mare Island Navy
Yards. All of this vast expenditure of money to be made in
the present depleted condition of the Treasury, while the poor
of Washington and other large cities are starving, and business
men are going to the wall, because there is not money enough
for the needs of trade. The Hon, Elijah Morse, of Massachu-
setts, said, on the consideration of this bill: “Mr. Speaker, all
the fish that ever swam in Behring Sea is not worth. one day’s
fighting between ‘these two great Christian nations.”

The United States can afford to be generous and progressive
along the line of peace legislation, even to taking the initiative
in a permanent Treaty of Aa bietion with a country as highly
cultured as Great Britain, for the peace spirit iss the cultured
one, and the war spirit the savage side of human nature; and
‘other nationalities would be sure to follow in the lead. An
alliance between the United States, Great Britain and France:
-would be too strong a one for any foreign power to attempt to
attack, and would at once render disamament feasible and prac-
tical. The danger of a war once removed from the powers of
Europe would be to the laboring masses like the dropping of the

great burden which Christian left at the door. of, the sepulchre


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within the walls of salvation. It would be the aawning ofa new
sun, an epoch in history ever to be remembered, that would
bring light and joy to the world.

The present industrial condition of the country, the struggle

_ of labor, organized and unorganized, against the grasping greed
of monopolies, of trusts, of vast aggregations, of capital, defying
competition and evading legislation, is a far greater menace to
the security and prosperity of the State than the frown of any
contiguous or foreign foe possibly can be. Canada and Mexico
are our sisters and friends, bound to us by consanguinity and
common interests on the one side, and by peaceful commercial
treaties on the other. In the past forty-six years there has been
no threat of violence from either. | |
- But a great strike, that quarters on a community thousands
of idle men, ties up the railroads, the great living arteries of a
nation’s life, impedes the mails and blocks the wheels of com-
merce, is a menace of which wise legislators should take note. A
Government that does not protect life and property, and the
guaranty to every citizen of the pursuit of happiness, fails in
its mission. The prime object of Government is the greatest
good to the greatest number, and that is why we are taxed to
support it. A strike is a war whose blow is aimed at the very
root of society, and, however good the intent, has proved as dan-
gerous in the hands of modern leaders as guns and pistols would
be in the nursery. | : |
Felix Adler, in his opening address at Columbia College
before the School of Ethics, in this city, referring to strikes,
uses these words: “Our country is disturbed ; the public peace
has been broken, and outbursts of violence are occurring at
shorter and shorter intervals. If we are not to rely upon mere
brute force in quelling these disturbances; if we are not to de-
pend upon boyonets and machine guns, we must find a way of
peaceably solving these difficulties. We must see whether we
cannot come to some conclusions, alleviate distrust, and allay

that keen sense of social justice which is far more operative to

breed discontent than distress itself.”
Carroll D. Wright, who has made social conditions the study
of years, said recently before the Woman’s National Press Club






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that the only true fighters and “the only true commanders are
the captains of industry ;” that America’s true greatness lies in
her industrial world, in which all classes are engaged, and in

which woman has now become an economic factor. He intimates

that the cure for the strike is culture, education, moral suasion,
and that the present tendency of organization in all classes of
society is bringing about this result. A social organization may
become, as this Woman’s Council will, a complicated machine
as powerful for good as a standing army is for ill, and a moral
force may become much more potent in a well otianiaed com-
munity than brute force. Organization stands to- kipe to moral
and mental development in the same ratio that the old hand
loom stands to the modern manufactory, or the stone mortar and
pestle to the modern flouring mill. All classes of labor are
organized, constituting so many industrial armies, and newspa-

pers and newspaper correspondents are by no means the last to

wheel into line. The news from Washington goes over the tel-
egraph, and not by post, to London by cable, and when these |
ladies have presented their papers to this Council of Women
their contents will be known at the same time to New York,
Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and London, as well as Wash-
ington. Thought, brain and handwork have belted the globe.

We are one people, with a community of interests, aspirations

and desires. Why should we quarrel with each other? Why

should we destroy each other, taking away lives that we cannot
give; laying in waste cities and towns; burning records, insti-
tutions, libraries and works of art that no skill or money can

restore, and for what? The gratification of a blind passion,

that settles nothing, accomplishes nothing, builds up nothing.
War is civilized murder, that brings no blessing in its train,
and leaves the cause of the difficulty to be settled later by arbi-
tration, by compromise, while the battle-fields are strewn with
the dead and dying, wives widowed, children orphaned, the home
despoiled, and fortunes confiscated. The quarrel is made by the

few; the honor, the fame and the money goes to the few.

The Red Cross, with the Treaty of Geneva behind it, as

ambulances and scores of trained nurses, in its benignant charity,
follows after the army, binds up the wounds made by the sabre


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and the bullet,'eloses the eyes of the dying, ant sends the part-
ing message to the widow and mother ; but the Universal Peace
Union, with a broader charity, a prevention instead of a cure,
seeks to abolish guns and bayonets; spike the cannons and con-
vert them into ploughshares; disband the standing army ; settle
all difficulties by arbitration, or by judicial methods, and ring

the “Liberty Bell’ around the world. Until that time arrives,

the Red Cross will continue its humane work.

Women have nothing to gain by war, and the laboring man
only a soldier’s grave, crippled in body, or wasted in health,
with his sacrifices speedily oe or ignored by the Cover
ment and the masses.

The duty of the State isto protect her industries, her manu-

factures and her arts; to improve her public highways, and to

facilitate Gitar eommtnicatlion for the advancement of the great
industrial armies who constitute what we call the commonwealth.
And the word is well coined, for it is the brawn and brain of
- a nation that constitute her real wealth, rather than her aecu-
mulations ; and it is the duty of our Government to-day to pro-
tect her captains of industry whose business is going to the wall
because the circulating medium of the country, so-called money,
is insufficient for the needs of trade. It is to this to-day that
we would utter the warning note of danger, and the remedy. is
in our own hands, for our Government credit is amply sufficient
for such an increase in our currency as would meet the wants of
the hour. Hunger and cold and want of shelter have no bus-
iness in a country like ours, for brawn and brain are capital for
which the Government should find employment, if necessary.
The great war of to-day in this country is a war for bread and
butter, and a battle of brains to learn how to arbitrate it by
permanent alleviation and legislation.

The Congress of the piniied States, each member of whith
is too strongly imbued with his own sectionalism and party
spirit, now at the close of its third heated term, finds itself
unequal to cope with this great financial problem, in which cap-
ital and labor, silver and gold, are struggling for the mastery,
while the Secretary of the Treasury has exhausted his financial
ingenuity to protect the gold reserve, and the credit of a great

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and wealthy nation is being weighed in the balance, and bars
tered on the markets of the world.

Could a Woman’s Council, with an upper and a pee house,
bane plunged the country into a greater financial disaster? —
And could you picture them wringing their hands in grief for
ways and means with which to fill the treasury, standing idly
by, while every day’s balance grew less? The fight for life, for
sustenance, for comforts, to say nothing of luxuries, is often a
bitter one, and to-day this battle is at many doors, waiting for
the deliverance of wise financial legislation when peace shall
smile upon them once again.

But 1 am here to represent the Sivaes Peace Union, coil

: branches, now a member of this Council, a our
one hundred fraternal societies across the water, and the Peace
Bureau, an outgrowth from it, and to tell what we are doing,
and hope to do, and to ask your thought and co-operation ; for
no thoughtful person, no humane person, believes in war, which
destroys everything and creates nothing but hatred.

We believe and teach peace and arbitration in the home, in
the church, in society, in the state, and between nations. We
believe in the sanctity of human life, the inalienable rights of
‘individuals, in justice, in equality and fraternity.. Our Govern- |
ment has already settled many serious difficulties with the various
nations of the world by arbitration and by treaty, without resort
to war and without bloodshed, and the expense of all of them
combined has not been one-tenth that of the War of the Revolu-
tion or the War of the Rebellion.

Just now we are doing what you are doing. Combining the
work of all these Societies in Central Bureaus, joining hands
across the United States and wiping out its sectionalism ; join-
ing hands with our friends across the Atlantic and in far-off
Asia; ignoring creeds and tongues, party lines and_ historical
legends; affiliating with Professors of Colleges and Universities,
and combining all of the friends of peace—and their name is
legion—in one grand cordon for the suppression of war. The
work of our Conventions and Conferences is sent to the crowned
heads of Europe and to the President of the United States. Our
resolutions and petitions are being introduced into the Parlia-






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ments of the world. We are nolonger man-fearing. Toreach

these, we begin with the home, the school, the society, the uni-
versity, the press—and here is one of our great strongholds—
and then to the halls of legislation. :
Our great but to-day is, first, permanent treaties af sate
tion between the United States and the great Christian nations
of the world ; a permanent International Arbitration Court, and
gradual disarmament. But it means education, culture, work,
money, combination, patience, faith and unlimited consecration.
Every year some af the faithful who have consecrated their
lives to the work pass over the river, and to-day we mourn
Sir Henry Richard, Lemonnier, Howard, Ruchomet, Mazzoleni,
AD estrem, Frederick Douglass, and a host of others, who have
/ wrought and gleaned with us, butf#e hold on with unwavering
* Thope in the belief that the day isnot distant when the Christian
orld will be relieved from the curse of war, for even now the
,, (Christian ministry are combining with us against this unholy
“\ warfare, this slaughter of the innocent, and the death of the

many for the emolument of the few. :

Peace Societies are springing Pie aon not only in the
United States, but in Europe. Switzerland has one in every
‘Canton ; Denmark has one hundred organized bodies ; England
rolled up in petition one million names to back the Cremer res-
olution for the permanent treaty between the United States and
Great Britain, and even Austria, with her Baroness Van Sutner,
and warlike Germany, are organizing Peace Societies. In the
latter country the laboring men’s unions are combining against
war and the extravagance of the war budget. The Sherman
bill in the Senate and the Coombs resolution in the House call
for the ratification of a permanent treaty of arbitration between
the United States and Great Britain, and the petitions of many
thousand citizens are behind them, urging thisimportant measure.
| Or banner is the white bordered flag of all nations.

f Organization is the hope of the world, and woman the elastic
cement that is binding organizations together, and by them and
‘through them we hope soon to hold the banner aloft to the
nations of the world, proclaiming the Fatherhood of God and
| the brotherhood of eas ee ie ;