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HISTORY OF THE Women’s International League U. 3. SECTION The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom grew out of the anxiety and strain of the early days of the World War. It began in an International Congress of Women, called by British, Dutch, and Belgian women to protest against war, meeting at The Hague from April 28 to May 1, 1915. Jane Addams, the chairman of the newly formed Woman’s Peace Party in America, was asked to preside. Delegates representing twelve countries, includ- ing seven of the belligerent nations, surmounted difficulties and braved public opinion to attend. The forty-seven United States delegates were detained on their boat for three days by British authorities, and finally landed only two hours before the Congress opened; while most of the English delegation were caught by the cessation of traffic on the North Sea, and never arrived. The delegates organized The Women’s International Committee for Permanent Peace, consisting of not more than five women from each nation, with Miss Addams as International Chairman and with headquarters in Amster- dam. This was to become, in 1919, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. At the 1915 Congress a series of resolutions was passed, which offered a statesmanlike foundation for a treaty of peace; they attracted the interest of President Wilson, and many of their ideas reappeared in his famous “fourteen points” (speech to Congress, January 8, 1918). Examples are the discrediting of secret treaties, the denial of the sight of conquest, the right of a population to decide on its own government. Nor did the influence of the Congress end in theories, for these same principles were carried over into the Covenant of the League of Nations. The Congress also advocated a “permanent Council of Conciliation and investigation” and a “permanent Court of Justice.” This move toward arbitration had its effect in the Covenant of the League, in the World Court, and in the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Another resolution made by this first Congress is particularly interesting in the light of subsequent accomplishment. “The International Congress of Women, advocating universal disarmament and realizing that it can only be secured by international agreement, urges, 25 & step to this end, that all countries ghould, by such an international agreement, take over the manufacture of arms and munitions of war and should contro} all international traffic in the same. It sees in the private profits accruing from the great armament factories a power- ful hindrance to the abolition of war.” The resolutions were presented by delegations of women to government leaders of fourteen countries, both neutral and belligerent. The most urgent suggestion was one for a Conference of Neutral Nations, sitting continuously to geck possible terms for peace and to present them to the belligerents as occasion offered, This proposal was welcomed by most of the fourteen nations. During the next_months the women made every effort to bring such a conference into being. The unwillingness of the United States government to call it or even to participate was the only obstacle; but one which proved insur- mountable. Next an unofficial conference of individual neutrals was planned. This actually opened in Stockholm, in January, 1916, financed by Mr. Henry Ford; but its appeals were in vain, and after thirteen months it passed out of existenc: when Mr. Ford withdrew his support. In America, the Woman's Peace Party held its first annual meeting in qanuary. 1916. It had been organized one year before at a mass meeting in - ashington. The impetus had been the war-protest lecture of Mrs. Pethick Lawrence of England and Mme. Rosika Schwimmer of Hungary, who helped . crystallize the pacifistic impulse felt by many Americans at that time. The new - ‘Woman's Peace Party had grown quickly. attracting during its first year about - forty thousand members, and showing tremendous activity in peace propaganda. - At the 1916 annual meeting it voted to become the United States section of the Women’s International Committee for Permanent Peace. The demands for a convention of neutral powers and for the nationalization of armamerts were common to the platform of the Party and the resolutions of the Committee,