MISS ADDAMS: Of course there is nothing so good for a democratic form of government as to have discussion on a public question upon which there is difference of opinion. This whole discussion in regard to the World Court is a very good thing, doubtless, for this country of ours because it forces us to consider afresh -- and with many people of the first time -- our whole international relationship, the place of the United States in relation to the rest of the world.
I do not think it is a mistake, or to be regretted, that the discussion promises to be prolonged in the Senate. I do not think it is a mistake, or to be regretted, that many people, in smaller groups, are taking it up; and I am sure that this organization, committed as it is to political affairs and their discussion, will realize that there is something rather interesting in the fact that women in so many countries received the franchise (certainly the women in England, Germany and various parts of the European continent, as well as ourselves) at the very moment that these international questions became matters [page 2] of practical politics. So there is a peculiar fitness in a woman’s political organization going into this whole question of the World Court as thoroughly as you have been doing. (pause for photograph)
Since you have had two very distinguished lawyers, Senator Borah and Senator Pepper, discuss this matter, more or less of course from the legal standpoint, with your permission I should like to go into other aspects of it, for I am not a lawyer and I should probably blunder if I tried to discuss its legal aspects. I would like to go back in my own experience -- Someone said the other day that I was a charter vice president of the American Peace Society which was started in 1829. (Laughter) While I cannot go back quite so far as 1826 in my personal recollections, I do want to mention some of the things preceding the World Court which show what was coming.
In 1875 as you -- perhaps a few of you in this audience -- may remember, the Universal Postal Union was established. Something of the sort has been taking place before, but that year it was perfected, so that from that time on we could put an American five-cent stamp on a letter and send it to Jericho, if we liked, or to almost any other part of the world with the exception of a few spots of savagery which had not yet joined [page 3] the Universal Postal Union. I was at that time fifteen years old -- I might as well be quite definite on that point! (Laughter) -- I remember how excited I was and how enormously interesting it seemed to me that you could buy a stamp from the United States and that it would send your letter anywhere.
Now all that has gone on so thoroughly and so completely, and the United States was such a pioneer in the organization of the Postal Union as well as a pioneer in the laying of the early cables which were in a sense supplementary to the Postal Union, and we have taken it all so for granted that we do not realize how firmly established international activity has become.
I recall also my excitement, and the excitement of many people, when in 1899 the first Hague Conference was called, and when in 1900 the Hague Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, as it was then called, was established. And then, as you will remember, nobody brought any case to the Court.
It was with it much the same as with our own Supreme Court in the United States when it was organized and bid to meet every February and August. It met first in February 1790, and then in August 1790; then it met in February 1791, and in August 1791, and in February 1792; and not a single case was brought before it until it met in August 1792. While now, as you know, its calendar is so crowded that it is a great question [page 4] what is to be done to clear it out and make the amount of work more reasonable. Something of this same sort happened with the Hague Court. No case came before it until 1902. It will interest this Club to know that the first case was brought by Col. Roosevelt when he was President of the United States. It had to do with the Pious Fund, as it was called, in Southern California. The land had been purchased from Mexico, and the question was whether Mexico had the right to sell lands belonging to religious orders. In one sense, it was claimed, Mexico did not own the land and she had no right to sell it to us. This thing had dragged on almost fifty years. Col. Roosevelt took it to the Hague Court -- the first case. It was adjusted, and the award was very largely in favor of the United States. In the years when I used to see Col. Roosevelt (because I was a member of the Executive Committee of the National Progressive Party) he was never tired of reminding me of this fact and also of the fact that he had received the Nobel Prize. Perhaps it is well for this organization of women that bears his name, to be reminded of those two notable events in his career.
There was another remarkable thing connected with Col. Roosevelt and the Court. That was later, when he brought that case before it which had to do with determining the Seal Fisheries question in Alaska waters, whether Canadians [page 5] or Americans had the right to fish there. A commission was appointed, and for the first time in the history of the Court something happened which laid a ghost that had been stalking around. It had been claimed that no man would ever give a decision against his own country. But Col. Roosevelt brought before the Court for decision the case of the seal fisheries, and as you may remember, an Englishman decided in favor of the United States. He decided against his own country for the simple reason that his own country was wrong. In my opinion, men will do that when they are put in an international position and asked to give the highest type of judgment of which they are capable -- when they are asked to decide, not as Englishmen or as Americans, but as men, trying to do justly as God gives them to see justice. So that laid forevermore the ghost of the belief that a man would never give a decision against his own country.
You know about the Hague Court, that it has had eighteen major cases and many other minor matters come before it, until the Great War came and it failed to function. No one tried to use it during the war, and it was knocked over, as were many other things dear to many people and which represented in the minds of some of us the highest achievements of civilization. [page 6]
After the war, as happens after every great war -- as happened after the wars of Napoleon and after the Thirty Years’ War -- men met together to see whether in some wise they could devise an instrument which would make war impossible; and when they found that was perhaps too difficult, they endeavored to devise an instrument which would make war less probable, and the result was the League of Nations and after that the World Court. The present court at the Hague is quite a different thing from the old Court of Arbitration and Conciliation. I am not going into certain questions which have been discussed before this body, questions which had to be discussed -- the more discussion the better for us. But here is this Court to which already adheres forty-eight nations. Now if we go into any World Court, it had to be a court acceptable to the world, not only acceptable to the United States.
In the arguments pressing toward entrance and against entrance there are three distinct positions. I think you know Senator Borah’s position. I am sure we all respect him as a man of the highest integrity who is acting upon his convictions, who is doing right as God gives him to see the right, in the words of Lincoln. The second position is that taken by Senator Pepper, who now, in the Senate, and out of it, is advocating entrance into the Court. The third position is represented perhaps more by the citizens of Chicago than by any one [page 7] group, and that is the position of people standing for the outlawry of war. I think that it is only fair to state as to this third position which is being urged in the Senate at the present time that it says the United States will go into the World Court under the Harding-Hughes Reservations on the condition that it will make another reservation that it will adhere for five years and will continue to adhere if during those five years some general treaty has been drawn up and signed by all [adhering] nations which will call war a criminal process. The great woman leader of that movement in this country is Judge Florence Allen. The man who talks most about it is Mr Morrison, editor of the Christian Century. Mr Salmon Levinson has perhaps done more than any one person in its behalf. With Senator Knox, he worked it out in detail. They claim that this will make the Court [worthwhile], as otherwise we will go into it merely on the chance of minimizing the probability of war, but with this reservation we will have an opportunity to go into a court which means something and which will bring a change in the history of the world. They believe that now, during the decade after the Great War, while we are still under the cloud of this horrible thing that has happened, that now perhaps is the only time when such a thing could be accomplished. I state that as the [page 8] third position, which perhaps has not had a full hearing.
There is still another aspect of the question, which is not legal and historic, and that is something which is going on in the world at the present moment in various directions. It is an attempt on the part of a number of groups to study our international relations in a perfectly scientific spirit, from the point of view of that insatiable curiosity which wishes to know the truth quite irrespective of previous conceptions or political affiliations. The school which comes to mind in relation to that is the new school established in the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in memory of Water Hines Page. Owen D. Young has defined this school (I will read his statement), first, as the beginnings of a laboratory attack upon war as a social disease, second, as an attempt to approach the problems of international politics in a disinterested curiosity, and third, as an attempt to train a group of technicians who may be able to apply their knowledge to the tangled affairs of the world.
Now of course you all know that facts never move people very much. Facts are [overestimated] in the minds of scientists when it comes to their relation to human action. People act when they have the sense of purpose, of impulse, of conviction, when they have been persuaded that a certain line of conduct is beneficial to the country and that another [page 9] line will injure the country. That is what moves them to political action. In the major interests of mankind, which are, I presume, religion, art, and politics, facts are a wonderful foundation, but they do not move to action. Mankind has to be moved, persuaded, urged on by an appeal to their emotions rather than merely by an appeal to their adherence to a set of facts. That is the sort of thing which this new group is trying to work out in the Robert Brookings School in Washington, the sort of thing which has induced people to endow Mr. Lindemann who is working out the experiment. It is the kind of thing which they tried to do at the Chinese Conference in Baltimore, to urge people to bring their minds together -- not to argue, not to get up anybody’s back, so to speak, but to get at some opinion which will not represent any individual opinion but will represent the opinion of a group trying quite honestly to act together in this new light that is opening before [women] as well as men that they must act as parties, as distinct groups, quite unlike the old individual action. That, it seems to me, is one of the new approaches to this whole international situation which it is well for a club like this to consider.
This is what is being done in the Foreign Policies Association, in the women’s clubs like the League of the Women Voters, and all sorts of others where they have international [page 10] [missing three pages] of the situation, try to get all the scientific spirit it is possible to bring to bear on our own minds and on the minds of groups, for the best possible comprehension of the situation. It is no more treason, no more going back on your country, to wish for a fine and clear and just international relationship than it is going back on your religion if you believe man was created through a process of evolution rather than in a moment. That it seems to me is what we are going to come to. I believe that this discussion will settle upon this larger and less personal basis, towards which all things seem now to be tending so far as we can see from an effort to understand the life which is about us.
I have in my hand a pamphlet on the World Court, issued by the Chicago City Club, sometimes called the Men’s City Club. But it so enrages them to be called the Men’s City Club that I have learned to say the Chicago City Club. (Laughter) This statement points out the fact which I think is interesting. It points out that the Republican platform of 1924 declared, “We endorse the Permanent Court of International Justice and favor the adherence of the United States to this tribunal as recommended by President Coolidge.” Now, this report say, if we are at liberty to say that the League of Nations was turned down by popular mandate because [page 11] the plurality of Harding over Wilson was seven million, we have the right to say that the World Court was “turned up,” so to speak, or approved, by the popular mandate when Mr Coolidge was elected president by a plurality of 7,749,606. The World Court was in this platform which received this overwhelming vote as the League of Nations was in the platform which received the defeat.
I do not personally believe that either of these arguments are true. I think the Democrats were defeated and the Republicans were elected for a variety of reasons. I think the reasons for which people vote are manifold. I do not believe that a great many persons were directly influenced in many instances by the desire to keep out or under, and so far as the public mandate is concerned, they are pretty nearly even. Certainly the Court has been endorsed by two Republican Presidents and two Republican Secretaries of State. The question is before the Senate now, being debated very hotly by senators on both sides. To my mind it is a good healthy thing for the public life of the United States to get a subject like this to put its teeth into and to determine the issue as wisely as it may.
(Applause)
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