posal of the League. High-minded people who cling to the principles of the army and navy through inheritance and tradition, and there are many, will still have an opportunity to uphold their ideals by placing their sons in the ranks. More honor, not less honor, will attach itself to a service that becomes devoted to the service of all.

A sincere step toward the reduction of armament, taken by all the great Powers, would do more to change the attitude of the public mind toward war and to awaken a genuine faith in the moral power of the League of Nations than any other one step.

Some one has said that women are not interested primarily in political reform. They are interested only in moral reform. Here then, is an opportunity for them to learn that they may use the political form for ethical purposes.

The League of Nations is the embodiment of a moral idea. It is an effort to standardize group ethics and erect a criterion of collective morality. It is an effort to make mass murder as punishable in the Court of the World as individual murder is punishable in the civil court. Its draft is an International Decalogue, given from the burning bush of war to place war where it belongs in the ranks of preventable, organized crime.

Not only will the League of Nations make war disadvantageous, but also, by stripping it of false idealism, it will make warfare an ethical question

as it has never been made ethical before. War has been considered a necessary evil - if only it were waged for a high enough ideal. In the future, no ideal will justify war, for always there will be the higher way open to settle difficulties. By the decree of the League, it is true, a nation does not surrender its right to declare war. It simply promises to submit its case to the World Court and wait three months before beginning hostilities. It is almost impossible, however, to think of a case in which a dispassionate court would advise war. If a country should defy the decision of the Court it will register itself a moral outcast as Germany became a moral outcast, even without a world court, in the Court of Public Opinion. The League of Nations will establish moral equivalents for war which no country will care to set aside.

Here again, women have a supreme opportunity to aid in the establishment of a Democratic League of Nations. They have, in fact a double chance. They have, first, the practical opportunity to use their new political power to uphold, through the ballot, the men who stand for a world league and to discard the men who do not; and they have also the ethical opportunity that the world has never denied them, to work for international morality. The League of Nations is to be founded upon law, to be sure. But it is to be law backed by moral force as all law must be upheld by public sentiment, since the world is not to be saved by legalities

alone. No nation may be legislated into righteousness. It is to be saved by the will to be saved, springing from a common moral conscience. And this moral conscience must be supplied at least onehalf, and it may be even two-thirds, by women. For practical morality, the world has always insisted, must be upheld primarily by women. The moral realm is the one realm where women have been allowed to hold unquestioned sway.

When enough women have grasped the fact that a League of Nations is a moral concept, designed to overcome evil and guarantee life, even before it is a political or an economic concept, the enthusiasm of women, I believe, will rally to give the ethical support to the covenant which it surely needs. The inherent instinct for race preservation and the imposed instinct for moral preservation will unite and blend into one.

When the churches, too, so largely maintained by women, awaken to the truth that the League of Nations is a moral question challenging their interest on ethical grounds alone, they too will become united banner-bearers of international righteousness. What an opportunity for a Christian renaissance! New checks upon national selfishness! New codes for industrial justice! New standards of the value of life! At last a unifying principle of Brotherhood, not a dream but a working reality! A great new gospel, a world-embracing propaganda to unite nations and renew man's trust in

God and man! Here we have the meeting of the old Hebraic law, "Thou shalt not kill," trying to overcome the law of the Jungle, and the new Messianic social gospel-"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."

It is for women, creators of life and to-day socially vocal, politically responsible, to say who is our neighbor. It is for mothers, the world over, to unite to put an end to war by aiding governments to establish this beginning of the Christ ideal.

APPENDIX A.

THE FOURTEEN POINTS.

1. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in public view.

2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants.

3. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.

4. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest points consistent with domestic safety.

5. A free, open-minded and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal