Evening Star Newspaper, November 12, 1921, Page 12

i i QMRS il v el gor o F THE EVENING STAR, WASHINGTON, D.. 0. SATURDAY NOVEMBER 12, 1921—PART e X e ) S = 7% An Open Letter to the International Conference for the Limitation of Armament In you the hope of humanity is centered. On you the fate of Civilization rests. Never in the history of mankind has so much power been concentrated in a single group of men. You are spokesmen for the greatest nations of the earth. You speak with the voice of peoples possessing power such as Rome never conceived; power never even dreamed of in the philosophy of the Ceaesars, Napoleons, and Kaisers of all time. This power of the great nations has been pooled, concentrated, intensified, multiplied, and placed in your hands to use as you may see fit. A few words from you, and War in all its hideousness will forever perish from the earth. If you so will, Pestilence, that ruthless, inevitable, inescapable twin brother of War, will never again exhale its burning breath to wither and torture and strike down the little children and the helpless ones of God's world. By your simple grace the gilded letters that adorn many a church and many a shrine will take on a new luster, and the words of the Ged-given text, “Peace on Earth, Good Will toward Men,” will glow and become, instead of an empty platitude, a living thing. T © ® YOURS is indeed a tremendous responsibility, for you are responsible to the dead as well as to the living. In the names of millions of our dead we, the women of the world, implore you to do something to end war—we who were their wives and their mothers and their little children. You are responsible to every sick and disabled soldier in every hospital and in every camp. In the names of these men we challenge you to do something to end war. You are responsible to the dying millions in the devastated areas of the war-stricken world. Their emaciated hands stretch out to you; their weary eyes beseech you: their faltering voices THE heart and the éyes of the world are turned toward you. plead with you. Hear their dying cries, see their wretched faces, and then do something—oh, strong men of sirong nations—to - make war and all that follows in its fearful wake impossible for the future. You are responsible to millions of babies that are yet unborn. What sort of world are you preparing for them? A world of strife and confusion and hunger and death? Or a world of peace and prosperity and happiness? Upon the result of your deliberations rests the answer. What is it going to be? ® C 9 WE recognize that the task that has been set for you is a gigantic one. We know that you are beset on every side by complica- tions and machinations and perturbations that must tax to the utmost your ability and your courage and your strength. But we ask you to see through the maze and the mist of it all what any woman would see if she sat with you—the rain-beaten white crosses on An Editorial Reprinted from the December Issue of the fields where once the golden grain was growing. To many a woman the War really began in a brave good-by and ended in a small white cross in France! It was a great vision, a marvelous skill, a hich technique that made it possible to send wave after wave of men across the seas to fight those battles and to die those deaths! You foresaw it all, you planned it all, you executed it all, and the compieteness of the victory shows how excellently you worked. ¥You did the unthink- ahle, the inconceivable, the impossible. For centuries to come technicians and historians will be marveling over the magnitude of your achievement. In 1914 you mobilized entire nations for War. In 1921, when the world is facing a crisis infinitely greater than it faced in'1914, can you not mobilize entire-nations for the constructive work of Peace? Can you not apply the same unfailing intuition, the same uperring judgment, the same unswerving loyalty to-day that you applied seven years ago? If you men of the International Conference will but sound the call there are millions of men and women in every country who will answer. There are millions of people who passionately long for peace and for the alleviation of the pain and suffering incident to war. A Peace army would not have to be drafted. How gladly would the people volunteer if you men leaders would but sound the rallying cry! T € ¥ THE opportunity is now before you. You can reason together calmly. No din of war distracts you. If you are big enough in your souls and free enough from prejudice and cant, you can settle your national differences on a high and firm basis. Such things have been done. We have a transcontinental boundary over three thousand miles long between the United Statés and Canada upon which there has not been for a hundred years need for a single gun, a single soldier, or a single fort. * For four hundred years the leaders of men have been saying with their tongues that right-thinking nations should arbitrate their differences just as right-thinking individuals do. Do not tell us it can not be done. Within the last century two hundred and fifty International disputes have been settled by arbitration. It is in your power to make arbitration the rule for the seitling of all Inter- - national disputes, and the time has now come to do so in order that the barbarism of war shall forever be relegated into the limbo of forgotten things. An era of International Peace can be estab- lished throughout the Earth right here and now if race prejudice, false patriotism, blind passion, and national arrogance are left at the door of the conference chamber, and if in their stead a spirit of good-wiil, mutual respect, and tolerance is admitted. May God Almighty give you who represent the world’s hopes in this conference at Washington the courage to carry out fair and just, decisions, the power to withstand pressure from all reactionary interests, and the vision to perceive the world's great need. - PICTORIAL REVIEW : eAmericas Leading Woman's Magazine NOW ON SALE AT ALL NEWS-STANDS EVERYWHERE