Miss Addams. Madam Chairman, I feel as if I had an enormous subject, "how to feel the world." It was given to me by the Committee, and I feel some of you are taking it too seriously.
There is no doubt that in this moment when the war has left us full of vital and generous experiences, when the spectacle of the self sacrifice of literally millions of men who have gone forth to accomplish that which can be only consummated in the future, and when the whole world is under a certain moral compulsion to receive the brushes which were tacitly made -- that this is the moment to come together ↑and consider↓ very large and grave subjects, which would not have been considered before. And there is this breaking down of the past, this tendency to reach forward, to break with traditional conventions, and make a nation for the future. It has always been felt after the great Congress of Vienna considered moral subjects even then and did what they could to regulate the slave traffic; you remember that Robert Owen appeared before them, and he stood almost alone at that [page 2] moment in his concern for the conditions surrounding working people in the then new factories, and did persuade Congress to also consider their condition. For the hundred years following that when Congresses met from time to time, as they did, world congresses, more or less [thoroughly] representative, they seemed to have lost out on this humane impulse and to have gotten entangled in Eighteenth Century conceptions of political power and national prestige and national honor, and national responsibilities, each diplomat acting for his own people. And it seemed very hard for them to really consider together human questions.
You know about their meeting in regard to cholera, six times in the latter part of the last century. Cholera entered Europe in 1871. The diplomats met together to see what they could do about quarantining cholera and keeping it in Asia where they thought it belonged.
They met over and over again; they met for a long time; and they talked a great deal, and each one was so afraid he would give over a little of the sovereign power of his country, that they disbanded, having done nothing. It is hard to believe, but they actually met again, five times, over and over again. Whenever Cholera appeared in Europe they met, and talked "What shall we do about it?" They always got so balled up, to use a common expression, in their own international relationships [page 3] and this peculiar thing which [seemed] so precious, that they did nothing about it until 1892, when they finally decided, after much deliberation, that they could quarantine the Suez Canal, because there the streams of [pilgrims] and the streams of traffic crossed each other, and they were willing to quarantine the Suez Canal.
In the meantime there was arising a great new sense of responsibility for public health, and doctors and scientists had enormous international organizations. If fact, they were so many that they finally had to form a division of the scientific and the medical associations, and they were doing all sorts of things about cholera, but the Governments were still tied up in what we might call the abstractions of nationalism, so abstract, so tight in its hold upon each nation, that they were afraid to approbate any power. They could not see the difference between giving up power and giving it over to someone else to administer for them.
Now again, when the great Peace Conference is meeting in Paris, there comes before it the same questions, but with this enormous advantage: That during the war there has arisen not only within the countries this necessity for guiding public health and feeding dependent peoples, but there has arisen a great international organization for these purposes. [page 4]
As you know, during the latter months of the war, no food was exported from these United States except under some international arrangement, no food was imported into Great Britain save through some national committee, and at the end of the war the Interallied Food Administration was formed, meeting first in London, and later in Rome, and now it is not only the five Great Powers, but twenty-nine other nations, neutral and allied, who have to do with the administration of the food of the world. That is a going concern at the present moment.
The League of Nations whether it is formed or not -- and we now know for a certainty that it will be formed -- the League of Nations has as its basis at this moment the distribution of the food of the world, considered as a whole, to the points of greatest need. It is a cooperative food league, and it has its own flag.
It has been found advantageous ↑by the Interallied Food Administration↓ to put upon the ships carrying the food for international purposes, a flag of its own, with two large horizontal blue stripes, with a white stripe in the middle. It is growing up out of the de facto situation, and the League of Nations has this to begin with.
What else have we discovered? We have discovered that food is so closely allied to shipping that the two things cannot be considered apart from another. There is the Interallied [page 5] Shipping Administration and the Interallied Financial Administration, and these have to do with the neutral as well as with the allied powers.
So, at the present moment, the League of Nations founded upon that most human and most wonderful undertaking, feeding those who need food, is in actual operation.
Why is this of special interest to women? It is of special interest to women because women were the first people to feed the world. They brought out the whole situation from the agricultural standpoint, not from the hunting standpoint, and they built up the whole basis of domestic ethics on that line.
So she gradually changed the whole habit of the human race from absolutely nomadic to a more settled mode of existence. She tied the man down a little longer, until she finally had some sort of domestic ethics that had been developed, and which have been the basis of national ethics, and these are the normal basis of our international relationships.
We cannot allow the people in Belgium to starve to death, nor the people in Serbia, nor the people in [Romania]. But no [page 6] child can be fed [today], certainly no group of people can be kept alive in [Romania] and Serbia save through international administration, and the test should be that woman should come into this arrangement on the food basis as she came into so much of her political interest and her political power on the food basis. When were women first recognized in municipal affairs? When clean milk became the subject of municipal legislation.
I remember years ago when I was in London, when the London County Council met there was a great discussion as to whether John Bright's daughter should be allowed to sit. The argument was that the London County Council did have to consider clean water and clean milk, and perhaps the women might be allowed to sit in the Council; but they were thrown out again because of the Eighteenth Century conception of Government.
Then we got into State affairs, into national interests, more or less in connection with the pure food laws and matters of that sort, and here we are facing a great international situation which has to do with feeding the world.
How shall we say it shall be done? Shall we say that Serbia shall be turned over to take care of herself, when we [page 7] know that Serbia has always had difficulty with food because she was surrounded by hostile nations, because they could put any sort of export duty they chose upon the things she was selling and any sort of duty they chose upon the food she needed to get, and which came to her from the sea.
Of course, they will say there must be some sort of an international high road to the sea, in order that Serbia may go on feeding herself, after the Allies have withdrawn their protection. They will see that strategic waterways must be internationalized in order that great stores of what may come out of the Ukraine for those countries where they are suffering from lack of food and bad harvests, due partly to their lack of careful agricultural costs, and also due largely to their bad arrangements for getting food and getting it out. And all those things will be considered from the point of view of food, from a great human impulse which will sweep away the theories of States' rights or national rights, so that they shall say it is not a matter of whether these unfortunate countries want an internationalized road or not; it is the salvation of Serbia, it is her very life which is involved, and we cannot not now, having preserved it so long, turn it over to these old conditions.
That is the thing which was lacking, it seems to me in the [page 8] peace of 1815; it is the thing which was lacking when people met from time to time at The Hague. There was no great economic and social impulse back of it which swept them out of every notion of what had been taught them regarding the function of the State, and swept them into a great, human, endeavor which united them upon a great, human basis.
Here it seems to many of us women come in, and there are many aspect to this food question that will have to be taken up in connection with labor standards which are to be considered shortly in Paris, if we may take seriously the announcement put out a week ago.
Among those standards are the prohibition of night work of women, so that women may nourish and properly take care of their children. How was this gotten? All during the last twenty years, when this matter of the prohibition of night work for women was being discussed it was gotten on an international basis, but never through diplomatic representatives, because men have felt they could not do it. A poor handful of reformers met from time to time and they said we must see to it that women are not allowed to work at night in these European States. They went back, and at the end of four years thirteen European Powers agreed that no women within their borders [page 9] should be allowed to work between ten o'clock at night and six o'clock in the morning.
Then there was an economic treaty among these Powers, and each separate national agreed and signed such a treaty.
But it was done in the hardest and most roundabout way, and the United States could not even come in because we had no way of making such a law on a Federal basis. Why not have done it in a more orderly way? Why not have had a representation of the various countries come together and go back to their countries with some sort of diplomatic standing? It could not be done in that way.
One of the greatest things in this Conference is that they are taking up these human bases of legislation, and this lack of proper international direction and understanding. Only the other day in Chicago there was a little boy five years old who had been born in Italy, a little scrap of a boy, and there was another little scrap of a boy three years old who had been born in this country, and the mother could not get a pension for the little boy five years old because he had been born in Italy, but she could get a pension for the three year old because he had been born in the United States. She was given a pension for the three year old boy so that she might give her attention to [page 10] the child. But there stood this little scrap of a boy five years old, who needed exactly the same thing his brother needed, but was not getting it because we are still going along in this old Eighteenth Century nationalism. What is going to happen? If some sort of standard is set up in Paris in regard to the care of children, some sort of international safeguard in regard to child labor, and what shall be done with the nationals in one country when they come to grief within the borders of another country, the whole thing will be cleared away.
In the case of these two little boys, the father was an Italian; he has never been Americanized; under this arrangement which says that the nationals of one country shall be under the protection of the laws of the other country in which they are living, [and?] that whole discrimination would be done away with, and the whole standard of life, not only for men and women, but for little children, would be enormously changed. I do not wish to be misunderstood when I talk about nationalism. There is a feeling abroad that an international agreement means an abrogation of national feeling. Nothing were more absurd. National feeling has never been so definite and so intense as at the present moment. This idea that to bring it to its highest possibilities we ↑have↓ got to have economic standards in regard [page 11] to food and labor must be established.
Take the condition of Belgium. When the Germans invaded Belgium they took a chance. They did not believe that England would take much account of it, and they took a desperate chance against any interference. If there had been a League of Nations, no other nation, however strong in an economic way, would have ventured to have disturbed Belgium's neutrality, because the punishment and the result would have been absolutely certain. That is the kind of protection which this new internationalism will give.
It will give it, not only in regard to neutrality, and in regard to State boundaries and national honor, it will give it also in regard to feeding and labor and standards of life which have to do with the human race. As such it can be concentrated within these national limits, and must never be allowed to fall below a certain standard which the civilized world proclaims.
So the whole prospect of the newer and finer life of the world is brighter because we have broken through into a general, continuing human experience.
What did this nation do when it broke away from its isolation and came into European affairs? It sent a wonderful [page 12] army, and certainly we all admire the reaction upon our narrow national existence in the sending of that army. But at the same time it broke through our isolation in another way. Every person in these United States was told to save food, and we were told to produce more food, and the one great national impulse was to save from starvation millions of people who had become dependent upon what America could save and produce, and thousands of men, women and children not only entered European life through a sense of participation in a great cause; they entered it through an enlargement of their sympathies, through a stretching out of their imagination, so that they knew not only with their means, but they knew with their deepest sympathetic understanding that those people were dependent upon them, and dependent upon them almost hourly, which was the old question of doing the will and learning the doctrine, perhaps the only way the American people learn any real humanitarian or religious doctrine.
So we say now let us utilize this tremendous getting together of the world on this fine basis of keeping alive the people who have suffered so horribly.
Mr. Hoover tells us they are buying for 240 millions of [page 13] people, that is the Interallied Food Administration. That is without the supplementary food which this Interallied Food Administration sends here and there in Europe and to the near East, the people would, many of them be so reduced by [malnutrition] and by continuous underfeeding that when the great privileges of self determination and freedom would be placed in their hands, those hands would be too feeble to hold them; they would be so enervated they would be quite unable to arise to the occasion which the purposes of the war have placed within their reach.
Therefore, from all standpoints it seems to many of us and we want to realize that the war has not only brought the usual results of war, it has brought a new internationalism into actual operation, and so far as America has participated in it, and especially so far as women have participated in it as never before, there has been a pull upon these basic, upon those maternal emotions and activities which lie at the bottom of all organized society.
And we are to ↑be↓ congratulated here in America that we have an opportunity to utilize and to bring it to bear upon our national existence, and to bring it to bear upon the forces of the world. All it needs is the continued organization, the continued sense of work under fine motives, a continued impression [page 14] of being essential to the future of the world. (applause)
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