SHOULD WOMEN ASK FOR PEACE.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume XXXV, Issue 8201, 26 July 1915, Page 2

SHOULD WOMEN ASK FOR PEACE.

MME. ADAM'S ELOQUENT ANSWER.

The "Gaulois" publishes the text of Mine. Juliette Adam's reply to the invitation sent her by Eleanor Fell to attend the International' Women's Congress at The Hague. It is as follows: " Madame, —Are you truly an English woman? 'Although 1 am but little of a suffragette, I must confess to you; that I- better understand those English women who would like to fight., England and France to-day have proof, of what arbitration and' mediation would have done for us. To ask French women at this moment to talk of arbitration and mediation, to discuss an armistice, is to ask of them an abdication of their national rights.

"All that they could do, all that 1 they ought to do, at the moment of Germany's unspeakable, act (I do not' speak of myself alone, who for 44 years have foreseen the ferocity of the German attack at the moment of j our most complete and humanitarian peace), all that French women could desire is to watch over and applaud their children, their husbands, their brothers, even their fathers, with the conviction that a defensive war is such a sacred thing that everything should be given up, everything forgotten, everything sacrificed, that death itself should be faoed heroically to defend and save what is most holy in the world, one's country. With our habitual generosity we have conquered our hatred and have treated the conqueror well and forgotten. He has taken shameful advantage of this to prepare ito crush us.

" To-day 1 ' every act, outside acts of wary, is monstrous." They lie, they loot, they burn, they: kill women and children, they take hostages, they assassinate wounded, stretcher bearers and doctors, they set fire to ambulances, they violate women, young girls and nuns! And how many Belgian victims have you in England? ■They destroy for the .s,ako of destroying, objects which more barbarous cen^ turies have resneeted.

■■■■•.7" Around mo, Madame, I. see. nothing among my friends". and "relations "but, ■lieroic\"ldeaths:iv vK-^oUld':'-'be' vircacHery;. to those I have lost' to seekanything but what is and ought to be, if the God of right and justice, the enemy of the demon, of brute force and of made pride, is the true God."