1930 - Annual Convention Report

              S I X T E E N T H A N N U A L C O N V E N T I ON 59
of Austria and Hungary was an achievement difficult to imagine before it
happened; it has put over a programme of health and social endeavor, of
trade and transit which ten years ago would have been considered impossible.
Under the wing of the League, the International Labor Organization was
established, " to secure and maintain fair and humane conditions of labor for
men, women and children and the well being, physical, moral and intellectual,
of industrial wage earners." A glance at the latest list of agreements and
conventions concluded under the League auspices would afford some idea of
the number and range of projects which have already been written into
treaties.
Intermingled with these successful ventures have been some failures, for
the League has its limitations. However, if one more decade brings an
equal degree of success such vistas of progress will open up as to make
glad the heart of mankind.
The one great force upon which the League relies for support, probably
the greatest force in the world, is public opinion. It has no army or navy to
enforce its w i l l ; it attempts only to establish and make permanent the new
hope, the new spirit, the modern international law of mutual consent.
Surely this phase appeals to the women of the world, and we find our
place in this unsurpassed movement to promote and establish permanent peace
in the opportunity to assist in forming public opinion. The channels through
which this can be done most effectively are the minds of the young.
A popular magazine recently arranged a symposium on what women can
do to promote permanent peace among the nations, to which seven prominent
women from as many different countries contributed. It is interesting and
significant that of these seven writers, five place the greatest emphasis on
the need for the reform of Education in the spirit of peace.
This, then, is our objective; to strip war of all its romantic glamour and
to present it only as the tragedy it i s ; to recognize the importance of training
a citizenship for the future that shall be imbued with the spirit of peace; to
urge that the stories glorifying war be eliminated from text books; to replace
m i l i t a r y training w i t h physical exercises; to have a copy of the Kellogg Peace
Pact displayed on the walls of every school room; to present a programme
or in other ways commemorate Goodwill Day, May 18th, and Armistice Day.
In short, to educate for the new patriotism. As one writer says: " There is
nothing unpatriotic in the thought that children must be trained to hate war
and to love peace. The nations of the world have renounced war, solemnly,
officially, and without equivocation, in a general pact, and have pledged to
seek the solution of their disputes only by pacific means."
If this means anything, it must mean re- education on the presumption of
peace. It must mean that we must do away with all militarism in our schools,
with all drills which keep before children the expectation of war. It is natural
that a generation, trained as ours has been, to think of war as a legal weapon
of a sovereign state, and as something inevitable, however deplorable, should
be unable, as our generation has been, to create an adequate mechanism for
preventing war.
But a new generation, trained to think the preservation of world peace
to be a first duty of citizenship, w i l l work out and perfect the world organiza­tion
which we have only faultily begun.