THE ST. LOUIS PEACE CONGRESS
CHARLES E. BEALS
Secretary Chicago Peace Society
The biennial gathering of the pacifist clans in the Fourth American Peace Congress at St. Louis, May 1-3, enabled those who attended the previous congresses (at New York in 1907, at Chicago in 1909 and at Baltimore in 1911) to gauge the direction and speed of the movement.
Like its predecessors, the St. Louis congress was initiated by the American Peace Society, which has been the national peace organization in the United States since 1828. Unlike any of its predecessors, the Fourth American Peace Congress was financed entirely by the local commercial association. The New York Congress had Mr. Carnegie for its god-father. The Chicago congress received material assistance from the Chicago Association of Commerce. The St. Louis congress was the first one the expenses of which were entirely underwritten by business men through a business men’s organization. This precedent will render easier the organization of future congresses.
In one respect the St. Louis congress was unique—in the official participation of Latin-American governments. This is not saying that this was the first congress in which ambassadors have taken part. Earl Grey, then governor general of Canada, Ambassador Bryce and the Mexican ambassador were notable figures at New York. Count von Bernstorff, the German ambassador, and diplomatic representatives of other nations were present at Chicago, and Minister Wu Ting Fang was the most picturesque and popular visitor at the latter congress. Indeed the international session of the Chicago Congress may perhaps be reckoned as the most thoroughly international of the four congresses. At Baltimore a French senator and a Belgian senator were conspicuous figures. But the St. Louis congress was the first in which the ambassadors and ministers of the Latin-American nations sat as official delegates representing their respective governments. And the frank, honest, kindly message delivered by the Peruvian minister was welcomed by all lovers of truth and international justice. In fact the congress insisted that he should repeat his address at another session.
The two addresses most warmly applauded were those of Dr. Thomas E. Green and Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones, both of Chicago. Dr. Green, a wide traveler and popular Chautauqua lecturer, spoke in place of Secretary of State Bryan, and his address was a piece of oratory of the sort seldom heard in this scientific age.
Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones discussed the psychology of heroism. The writer recalls riding with Mr. Jones in Washington in 1909, when we were corralling speakers for the Chicago congress. Mr. Jones burst out: “I want some one to discuss the psychology of war. There will be plenty of discussion of international law and of the economic, moral and educational aspects of the peace problem.” Then and there the subject of Armaments as Irritants was assigned to the veteran social worker and militant pulpiteer. And his presentation of this subject before the Chicago congress (using the homely barnyard figure of de-horning cattle) was one of the most delightful and valuable contributions to that congress. At St. Louis he followed up this psychological investigation with his survey of heroisms. So human, so true to life, so morally prophetic, so shot through and through with first hand information gained in four years of service in the Civil War, so illumined with poetry and ripe literary culture was this address, that again and again the speaker was forced to bow in response to the prolonged applause.
There were not lacking men who “spoke by the book,” men who had participated in the Hague Conferences, senators and representatives, authors of books on international problems—men like former Vice-President Fairbanks, Dr. James Brown Scott, Senator Burton (president of the American Peace Society), Congressman Bartholdt (president of the congress), Congressman Ainey, Dr. Benjamin F. Trueblood (for over a score of years secretary of the American Peace Society), Prof. Paul S. Reinsch, Prof. W. I. Hull, Dean W. P. Rogers; the United States commissioner of education, Dr. Claxton; college presidents like David Starr Jordan, C. F. Thwing, S. C. Mitchell, A. Ross Hill, Laura Drake Gill, Frank L. McVey, Booker T. Washington, and others; business men like Andrew Carnegie, Leroy A. Goddard, J. G. Schmidlapp and Eugene Levering; the secretaries and directors of various peace offices from Bunker Hill to the Golden Gate; the official head of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, Mrs. Pennypacker, and her predecessor, Mrs. Phillip N. Moore, under whose administration was created the peace department of the women’s clubs. British America was represented by such distinguished men as Hon. Benjamin Russell, justice of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, and John Lewis, editor of the Toronto Star.
In connection with the congress inter-collegiate oratorical contests were conducted, the coming Hundred Years of Peace Celebration described, special church services held, and social courtesies bestowed through receptions and dinners.
Should one ask what is the most characteristic feature of the peace movement in 1913, perhaps it might truly be said that pacifism more and more is being formulated into a science. The organized peace movement began ninety-eight years ago purely as a moral reform. It is no less a moral reform today. But it has accumulated a vast amount of historic, economic, juridical, biological and general sociological data.
When one considers the movement of the human animal from the day of the man whose bones recently were dug up from the Sussex gravels; when one measures the progress of human beings from cave-dwelling to Universal Postal Unions and Hague Conferences and Courts; when one notes the marked decrease in the number of wars, the total abolition of private war, the almost revolutionary mitigation of war practices (so that today one finds it comparatively comfortable to “get his living by being killed”); when one remembers that the world is beginning to think in economic terms; when one examines the beginning already made towards the substitution of judicial procedure for fist law; when one counts up the half hundred things actually being done officially by governments acting internationally; when one perceives that the man animal is specializing in two things—rational thinking and morality—then one can easily believe that, having so progressed from jungleism towards internationalism, the race probably will not stop now and here.
Direction and distance are prophetic. Only by some unforeseen and catastrophic and utter extinction of the human species can man escape his blessed and inevitable and rapidly approaching terrestrial destiny of organized pacifism and world-wide scientific and industrial co-operation. The tiny mountain rill of pacifism has become an ocean-seeking river, on whose mighty current the war-afflicted human race is being borne on towards the ocean of a real civilization.