PEACE OF WORLD

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 49, 27 February 1937, Page 10

PEACE OF WORLD

WOMEN'S CONTRIBUTION

"Women's Contribution to Peace" was the subject of an address given by Miss Mary Graham, at a meeting of the women's auxiliary of the Wellington branch of the- Douglas Social Credit Movement of New Zealand.

Miss Graham gave a short historical sketch of the attempts by Greece and Rome to establish a code of laws to ameliorate the brutality of warfare, prevalent in the centuries preceding the Christian era, and the acceptance of those laws by Hugo Grotius, the Dutchman, who used them as the basis for international law acceptable to Christians and Moslems alike. These became the foundation of the laws to which many nations agreed at the Hague Tribunal in 1899. Many believed that savagery in warfare was finally abolished, and some of ,the finest people in different countries began to picture a world without warfare. Unhappily for mankind, every one of the laws regarding humanised warfare were broken during the Great War and the way became open for all the earlier barbaric acts to be Vepeated, as had occurred in Abyssinia and Spain. Women were beginning to realise that they and, their children were no more safe in future wars than the actual combatants. That was developing a state of fear, and was the direct cause of a reduced birth-rate, for the poison of death-dealing bombs had poisoned the life-springs of the people, and would continue to affect the birthrate. Women's efforts should be to picture a world in which there would be no more war, in which the abundance of goods made possible by modern machinery would be so distributed as to prevent greed in the hearts of mankind, and remove the chief cause , of war,'which was economic at its root. They might further practise peace at' home and in their own neighbourhood by the power of thought concentrated on peace on earth. Peace was made by human beings. It did not happen by chance. Therefore, women could achieve peace by deliberate effort to establish it in their homes first, and then in the nation.