| OCR Text |
Show 52 ew iltttttt‘t'ttt {We about thirty children in these schools and about tive in their . . . . ‘5 homes, Therefore. we prided ourselyes in thinking that the me»sage was sent out that day to fifty thousand as a conservative estimate. Each child carried from that ball a program daintily printed with thoughts gathered front Mrs. Mead's invaluable l‘eace Primer. Each child carried and wore for a year afterwards, and some of them are still wearing it. a peace button. \\'e who work with children know the value of the tangible thing. This great movement that we are entering upon with more vivid conscious.- ness than ever before. we know that it seems far off and we know also that it seems to us teachers like one thing more, and we always dread that one thingT more, not having yet learned how to adjust the one thing more to the things in hand. lt is not one thing more, it is a unifying force. it is the greatest unifying torce that has ever come to the schools, because the lessons in history and geography and arithmetic can be related with it. and living thoughts can be brought into the examples. For instance. I thought of one the other afternoon. How many of our little ones go to work for a dollar and a half a week. it costs $1.700 to tire one shot from a gun. How many children Could be kept in school another year for that $1,700? Surely that contains an economic study, that contains a moral thought. and certainly it is not very difficult to feel that it has religion in it. Out of that Congress of 1004 there sprang a little organization of girls. These girls had been studying (:it ‘ history. Becotn‘ mg interested in their local history they began to broaden out into the state and the national life. and it was not very difficult to extend that thought into the international thought. This little group learned peace son " They learned these songs and then went from place to place singing them wherever they were invited. \\'e took pains to have the words of these songs printed on our programs. and we found that there were a great many other people who thought along these lines while these children were singing. and they carried these programs to their homes. We saw then that one club was not sufficient to bring into consciousness this broader thought, and a group of clubs was organized. These groups were related one club with the others. and the children 53 acre enlisted immediately into this broader international rela~ tionship of the nation. In 1907 came the great opportunity to New York of holding the First National Peace Congress, and when we asked for a children's meeting, even those with whom we were working said, "Which hall will you have? "fill you ltave the church, or will you have the Board of Education, or will you have some other small ball?" We wanted no small ball, but we wanted the largest we could get, because we knew that the scheme of organi- zation devised in 1904 could easily fill any hall in New York. Carnegie Hall was filled, and there were five hundred children on the platform singing, gathered front the seliOols. and gathered inside of two or three weeks. There were about four thousand in the seats and in the boxes. The private schools occupied the boxes and paid for the privilege of coming. The public school children were elected by their classes and carried back to their classes reports. Think of the thousands of homes into which this message was carried, The, Young l'eoplc's international liedcration League was simply an expansion of that one little City History (Tub. and now those City llistory clubs have developed into chapters of the Young People's lntermtional Federation League. The tlrst chapter organized was named the Kathrina Trask ('hapter. alter Mrs. Trask. of New York. who has written one of the greatest appeals to the .'\nglo~$axon race I'or dissemination. I am sorry the ht are not here so that l might tell them of a boy s' chapter which is studying" beginning with .\lrs. Head's l'eace l'rinu-r and reaching up to a history of the peace movement. which was )lrs. Mead's tlrst speech at the l‘iii'st National (‘ongrt-ss, There is so much that is strong and virilt- and inspiring that it set-ms almost a pity to write anything else on the peace movement. These things are not beyond the child‘s U)lllIH't‘llt‘lhliIlt. It is inst as easy for a child to undtrstzmd the feasibility of the federa~ lion of the world as it is to understand the organization in his own home. 1 believe that this is one of the most inclusive subjects before the human mind today. l believe that it begins in the home and I hope the time will come when it will culminate in The llagne. \\"e have a little: rgan. "l'rom the home to The Hague," and the |
