FOREWORD I agree with Mrs. Tuttle's message that women must help end war, and that they may do it effectively by getting behind the League of Nations organization to make war as improbable as possible and by loyally supporting the League and urging its adoption by this country, and particularly in the Senate of the United States. I sincerely hope that Mrs. Tuttle's book will help to concentrate the public opinion of the women of the country and lead the Senate to realize the weight of public sentiment in favor of this great instrumentality for peace. WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT. "Among the soldiers of the French army, as well as among those of the British army, there was, from the beginning, a sense of despair that civilization itself should have been dragged down to such depths of degradation in the filth of the battlefields with their wholesale slaughter of youth and of life's beauty and decency. Their hatred of the Germans who were the direct cause of this did not blind them to the larger truth that the whole structure and philosophy of Europe had been damnably guilty and that if it had been different - O God, in some way different! not even the Germans would or could have let the devils loose upon the boyhood of the nation and upon women and children. "Over and over again in the early days French officers and men said to me with a thrill of passion in their voices: 'If I thought this Thing would ever happen again I would strangle my child in its cradle to save it from torture'. This was said to me not once, nor dozens, nor scores of times, by bloody and bandaged men, but hundreds of times. It was the common, general, passionate thought. Young English officers of good families argued passionately in the face of death that all our social structure was wrong (the italics are mine) and that there would be no hope for humanity for which they were going to die - they knew that — unless some new relationship between nations could be established. -PHILIP GIBBS: New York Times, March 7th. |