WOMEN'S INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE FOR PEACE AND FREEDOM
June 26th, 1924.
Dear Miss Addams,
I am very glad to hear from Washington Headquarters that I am not mistaken in supposing that after all the Congress must have stirred up a great deal of interest in the States and that people are enquiring and calling all the time. In Unity I see the proposal of Mrs. Spencer that all the Peace-[organization] may federate; I wonder whether you will find it acceptable and reliable. I wish people would be ready to cooperate without all the complicated business of federation, it would be so much easier!
I am besieged by Mr. Spiller with his "Seven years' campaign for World Peace" on one side, Mr. Golay of the Peace Bureau in Berne with their Centre de Coordination on the other, without being convinced of the usefulness of either of them: they both suffer of a lack of practical suggestions and merely repeat the principles we have heard and told thousand times, while interest over here does not exist for anything but practical action for peace.
We had three callers from South Africa this week; one of them is the secretary of the Peace Society there and attended the Wembley Conference of the I.C.W. She had found it what you called a "dress parade" without any discussion and was very much interested in our literature; her name is Mrs. Solly, we had her already on our mailing list. The second was a high school principal who just resigned and seems too tired to be interested in anything. The third, whom I missed, being at the Labour Conference, will come again [tomorrow] and proposes to found a section in South Africa. That would be fine! I shall do my best to keep her in touch with us until September, when she sails.
I received today a proof of Congress Resolutions [page 2] from Mrs. Post, including the list of officers and Committees elected. This made me aware that I have been guilty of using the name of General Secretary at the bottom of the last News Letter, while in the Report I shall be called Headquarters Secretary. Please do not consider this as an expression of vanity; I have no feeling whatever for titles. But here, in the correspondence with League of Nations people, I simply have to use it, if I want to get a serious response from them. Now Miss Friedlander, our English assistant, being accustomed to it, put it in the same way under the News Letter and when I saw it, the stencil was finished and I did not want to have it made over. I shall call myself simply secretary in our [internal] correspondence.
Yesterday I had an interesting interview with the head of the Minorities' Section in the League of Nations' Secretariat whom I had sent the resolution of our Congress on Minorities; perhaps you will be interested in his opinion about it, which he gave confidentially, asking us not to quote him. I shall send copies of it to Miss Heymann and Mrs. Hertzka and discuss with the what could be done at the next Assembly.
We have not discussed in what form the five big states outside of L. of N. are to be asked to enter the League. I feel that a simple written appeal would not do at all and I think that we hardly shall have in the next year the possibility of sending a delegation to either of them. I hope Miss Heymann will be able to talk this over with Miss Marshall. [written in left margin] ↑V?↓
I have sent Miss Balch all I possibly could to help her in preparing the treasurer's report. The last balance sheet was controlled by an expert who found that Mme. Métral, the former bookkeeper, whom Miss Balch put in charge before she left, had made her inscriptions later or sometimes earlier than they were due and that this made the balance sheet [inexact]. To improve it, he would have to make over the balance for the whole year. I wrote to Miss Balch that I do not think this would help much, because Mme. Métral most likely had made her inscriptions just as [inexactly] at the end of December as at the end of June and we should waste money without any use. Still if she wishes to have the balance sheet of the whole year made over, she may cable me. I put another question which should be settled by cable, if in the affirmative; whether a balance sheet for the four first months of this year is to be made, so as to end with the date of the Congress. Her answer is due -- if by cable -- one of these days. I am awfully sorry to have been so silly not to dismiss [page 3] that woman as soon as I saw that she was not conscientious, for fear to hurt Miss Balch. But this cannot be helped anymore.
Next Wednesday we shall have an afternoon ↑tea↓ with the women delegates of the Labour Conference and, so I hope, Mrs. Bugge-Wicksell who is here for the Mandates Commission. Miss Sybil Jane Moore is due for next week too and Mrs. ↑S↓ Henry, member of the [Labor] Bureau at Washington who sent us a recommendation of Miss Abbott. They both will live in our house which is filling up since May. Miss Holmes is very devoted to her job, so that I often wonder whether we should not ask her to stay for another year instead of leaving next April. It would be preferable to have a French woman as mistress of the house, but Mme. Duchêne thinks we could not get anybody to accept a similar position without a salary.
The German Section has ordered 1000 German reprints of your opening speech, the object and the Manifesto, the English 500, the others have not yet declared what they need. I hope the work in Europe will have got new strength from the Congress too. Even in Geneva representatives of different groups will discuss with us [tomorrow] the arrangements for the Anti-War-day in September.
May I remind you that in July I have to go home, to follow the order of my school-authority. I hope to leave her about the 20th and to return about the 20th of August. We try to prepare all the work that requires the help of our English assistant during the summer, so that she may be able to do in September the work necessary during the League Assembly. Afterwards, if some unexpected reason does not make her absolutely necessary, I shall dismiss her; since I came back, I [realize] that she is not more than an intelligent clerk, without special interest for our cause and so there is no use in keeping her any longer than strictly necessary.
I wanted to make an experiment in economy this week when posting our newest leaflet: many business firms here mail their letters and circulars in France. So we sent our young clerk who lives quite near the border and has her bicycle, to ask for a French visa; it was refused to her, because -- one of her uncles had come to Switzerland in order to avoid military service in France. So my good will could not be carried out, because anyone else should have to pay the very high tram fares and all the economy would be lost. No talent for economizing, alas!
With kindest regards
devotedly yours
Vilma Glücklich [signed]
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