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 for the first time -- our whole international relationship, the place of the United States in relation to the rest of the world.
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 become matters 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.
I would like to go back into my own experience. Someone said the other day that I was a charter vice president of the American Peace Society, which was started in 1826. 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 had 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 almost any other part of the world, with the exception of a few spots of savagery which had not yet joined the Universal Postal Union. I was at that time fifteen years old -- I might as well be quite definite on that point. 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 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 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 has 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, her 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 the case before it which had to do with determining the Seal Fisheries question in Alaska waters, whether Canadians 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 for 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 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.
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 was impossible. And when they found that was perhaps too difficult, they endeavored [page 2] 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. But here is this Court to which already adheres forty-eight nations. Now if we go into any World Court, it has 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.
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 Walter Hines Page. Owen D. Young has defined this school -- 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 line of conduct 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 Women Voters, and all sorts of others where they have international committees. Sometimes the results of the action is a mere travesty of what the friends of the movement hope for, but after all, it is a new line of approach. Personally, I believe this new approach, this attempt to get at life, away from our preconceptions, to envisage our international relations with some sort of moral standards such as we have long tried to apply to our relations within the nations -- between cities and states within the nations -- I believe in time that will bring a new influence to bear on this whole heated discussion of the World Court.
I should like to say just a word of my personal experience in this connection. Living as I do with immigrant neighbors, some of the action which has gone on with reference to the League of Nations has come very close to me. I am referring to this although it was suggested by a friend of mine, not your president, because she is a fearless person, but it was suggested by a friend that it would be best for me to make no reference to the League. However, I think it is well for us to know how close to us international matters come. Italian farm workers come to us in the United States by way of South America. They are very clever, these workers. They follow the ripening crop from the equator clear up to North Dakota, and then they may go back home for a few brief months, for relaxation if you will, and then come back again and do it all over. They can’t do that quite so easily now as they did before the new quota law. Now many of these Italians, working up from south of the equator, from time to time would fall into difficulties in South America, Central America and the Caribbean countries. They would be miles away from an Italian consul or anyone who could help them. This whole question of immigrant labor upon which the harvesting for the people of this hemisphere depended and still to a great extent depends, is an important matter in the lives of the people undertaking it. You can imagine my pleasure in Geneva, in 1921, to find that the International Labor Office of the League of Nations was taking up the question, and when I came home the Italians came in and asked me about it, not as an extraneous thing, but concretely, what are they going to do with the International Labor Office? These were ignorant men.They didn’t not read the papers, but they knew about this thing which seemed to them a great hand of protection put over them.
I remember when the League of Nations arranged for the interchange of populations between Greece and Bulgaria. That was done under an advisory opinion issued by the World Court. These advisory opinions have been attacked by Senator Borah. An advisory opinion is an attempt to get back of a legalistic interpretation -- to leave the legal situation in the foreground and not wait until the decision of the courts. This exchange of Bulgarian and Greek populations did a great deal to ease the situation in a part of the country where things had not been pleasant between Greeks and Bulgarians since the first, and more since the second, Balkan war. It goes to show that there are certain things which cannot be taken care of except by a body of men who look at them as a whole and who act with the most righteous judgment of which they are capable.
I remember when the first biological discoveries were made. I think it was Lord Haldane who called them indecencies to be put out of the way as much as [page 3] possible because they ought to be discussed in polite society. When the first anthropological discoveries were made they were regarded as blasphemy -- and we may still see that in some minds they are even yet regarded as blasphemy. When the first efforts were made to open international relationship people were told it was treason. It is easy to put out a word that will discredit a person who is trying to think out this new thing. No one of us can do it. All we can do is to keep our minds as clear as possible and try to understand the trend 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 coming to. I believe that this discussion will settle upon this larger and less personal basis, towards which all things seems now to be tending so far as we can see from an effort to understand the life which is about us.
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.
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