BRITAIN'S DELEGATE OX PROTOCOL.

White Ribbon, Volume 30, Issue 357, 18 April 1925, Page 8

BRITAIN'S DELEGATE OX PROTOCOL.

Speech by Mrs H. M. Swanwick at the close of the Fifth Assembly and of the discussion on the Draft Protocol of Arbitration and Disarmament. The President called upon her as follows:

“By a happy chance, the last speaker to address the Assembly on this important subject is a woman delegate, who is going to voice the adhesion of the woman of the world to the great work embodied in the Protocol. I call on Mrs Swan wick, Delegate of Great Britain.”

Mrs Swanwick (British Empire): “Mr President and Fellow Delegates, I feel very deeply the kindness and courtesy of the President and of my fellow' delegates in allowing me to say a very few words. It is perhaps due to the fact that no woman has spoken on this subject at this Assembly, and that we have the classical privilege of the last word. At the same time, ladies and gentlemen, it would be immodest in the extreme for one woman to attempt to speak for all women. It is a danger that every woman in this hall knows, that a woman w r ho speaks always runs the risk of people saying that s.ie speaks for all her sex. We differ, gentlemen, as much as you do, though per-

haps more. “I wish to appeal to you, however, in a way that I think perhaps no woman would contradict, and I believe in my heart no man either. I would appeal to you in the wrords of the speech that I think moved me more than any I have heard here, that of Mr Paul-Boncour, in which he said that von had been making a great machine. It is a formidable and a complex machine, and it would depend entirely upon the spirit that moves that machine whether it is a machine for good or a machine for evil. We have listened and taken part—women as well as men—in the discussion and study of this difficult problem. We are going back to our countries, and we shall have to explain the scheme we propose; we shall have to explain its provisions and its possibilities, and also its dangers, to the workers of the world. We must get the adherence of the workers of the world If we are to

make this an engine for good. In one way, 1 am not afraid to speak a* a woman, because modern life has shown us a few women who have looked into the future and realised the great responsibility of women. We have had women who have suffered the very worst' that women can suffer in 'he loss of their dear ones, but who yet have appealed against revenge and pleaded for reconciliation. We have had women like that mother, the mother of Rathenau, who appeared that there should be no revenge for the loss of her son. We have had a wife like Sonora Matteotti, who made the same appeal, that men should not revenge the wrong done to her. We English are proud of having among our patriotic women. Nurse Edith Cavell, who said, in words which should be engraved in letters of gold on her statue, but which unfortunately are not, (as our readers probably know, those words have now boon placed on the monument) that “Patriotism is not enough.”

“We have a great responsibility. You who are the representatives of Governments all the world over, you nave to speak for, and act for the dumb millions of the world, and, gentlemen, the responsibility that falls upon you, that there shall be no disillusionment in this matter, is tremendous. If, when this great engine is perfected, it is not used as it is intended to be used by you who have made it here, for impartial judgments, you will lose the faith and he confidence of the common people all the world over in the reality of the League of Nations.

“At last we are told that Arbitration is going to take the place of war; at last we are told that security is going to come to us, and I hope that that security will be a security of a very different order than that which women have been promised by men all down the ages. Do not you think that Hector told Andromache that he was protecting her? Do not we remember that throughout all the World War and the years that have followed it the cry of Astyanax has rung in our ears all the world over: Remember that when you turn your arms against each other, my brothers, the first victim is the child.—From the News Sheet of the WM L.