INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATION FOR INTERRACIAL GOODWILL

By EDWIN D. MEAD, Boston, U.S.A.

THE Lake Mohonk Conferences on International Arbitration were inaugurated in 1895, after there had been held at Lake Mohonk for several years previously Annual Conferences upon the duty of the American people to the Indians living within their borders. The first three Mohonk Arbitration Conferences were made memorable by powerful addresses by Edward Everett Hale, the Nestor of the Peace cause in America, as we liked to call him in his later years, demanding and prophesying a Permanent International Tribunal. By virtue of their grasp of the international situation, their foresight and their inspiration, these addresses were the most inspiring and most noteworthy which have been heard at the Mohonk Arbitration Conferences during these seventeen years. Their central demand was that nations, well disposed as the best of them were to arbitration, generally speaking, should not leave provision for arbitration to times when some special dispute arose or some special danger pressed, then creating a special commission to deal with the particular case arising, but that the nations should co-operate to establish a Permanent International Tribunal, which should always be in existence and always ready to deal with every international difference. Cases should never wait for courts, said Dr. Hale, but courts should always be ready for cases, and this was in no field more imperative than in the international field where there was no provision of any kind. It was foolish and criminal to leave to some acute crisis, when two contesting peoples were aflame and in hot blood over their disagreements, the preparation of machinery to dispose of the disagreements. No time is so unpropitious for such action. There should be a Permanent International Tribunal, of whose existence every nation would be conscious in the critical hour when there was need of the offices of arbitration. Its chief service, said Dr. Hale, would be in the fact that it existed, that every nation knew that it existed, and that not to have recourse to it instead of to individual vengeance in the hour of conflict or dispute was dishonour. In a word, civilised nations in the family of nations must follow the same course in their disputes and differences which is followed by civilised men in individual nations. When Dr. Hale in 1895, 1896, and 1897 thundered this demand reiteratedly at Lake Mohonk, he was told by learned and distinguished diplomats and jurists that it was a noble ideal, and one which in

some fine but distant future would doubtless be realised, but it was far ahead of the times, and its realisation was not to be expected in our generation. That was probably the judgment of most so-called "hard-headed" men, even progressive men, at Mohonk and elsewhere, in 1897. But in 1898 the First Hague Conference was called, and in 1899 the Permanent International Tribunal at The Hague was established.

This is an interesting, an encouraging, and a directing chapter of history for us as we meet in the interests of another great line of effort to bring about justice and brotherhood among the peoples of the world. It reminds us that in this time, when men the world over touch elbows as never before, and the interest of each is the interest of all as never before, very great things may be suddenly brought to pass in a very short time. But especially it directs us as to the right way to do the things which we, who have come together in this Congress, have to do. It is no new thing for good men in a score of nations to interest themselves seriously in the relations of different races within and without their own borders, and no new thing for special organisations to be created, and special Conferences held, to deal with special wrongs. Such flagrant wrongs have compelled sympathy and indignation and protest and united action of some sort in every year of the lives of every man in this Congress, and in every nation from which most of us come. The Congo Reform Associa tion is an illustration. The terrible atrocities in the Congo were told about by missionaries and others here and there for years. By and by the volume of reports became so great and so authentic that there was wide public discussion and public protest. Mr. Morell and others here in England were so stirred that they threw their lives into the work of exposing and reforming the horrible situation. You in England organised a Congo Reform Association. We in America, prompted by your action, organised another; France and Switzerland, and I know not what other countries, organised theirs, and all did noble, vigorous, expensive and measurably successful work. The attention of the world was arrested, the conscience of the world was touched, and there is undoubtedly a better state of things in the Congo State to-day. At any rate, all men there know they are under watch and on their good behaviour. Groups of humane and civilised men have risen and organised similarly when there was wickedness in Armenia, in Macedonia, in Crete, in Russia, in India. Societies exist or have existed in England and America and other countries con cerning inter-racial tyranny and wrong in these late years in all these places and a dozen more; but the efforts have usually been

so delayed, so improvised, so poorly supported, and so unrelated that they have never half done their work. They are like the special arbitration commissions, arraigned by Dr. Hale, created under pressure all through the last century, to meet some menacing crisis. Such commissions did not meet the world's needs, and. these fitful and sporadic societies to deal with sudden tragedies and threats do not meet the world's need. The world had to organise a Permanent International Tribunal; and we have to create a permanent international organisation to watch the world over the inter-racial injustices and wrongs which have commanded our assemblage here. I do not forget that there exist agencies for coping with the tyranny of so-called superior peoples over weak peoples of much more permanent character and much broader scope than such organisations as the Congo Reform Association. The Aborigines Protection Society here in Great Britain is such an agency. As concerns British obligation and effort in one great field of our problem, it is in its definition of purpose and range of activity almost precisely the thing to be desired in every country. This noble Society, which was founded as far back as 1837, threequarters of a century ago, was the outcome of the work of a Committee of the House of Commons "to consider what measures ought to be adopted with regard to the native inhabitants of countries, where British settlements are made, and to neighbouring tribes, in order to secure to them justice and the protection of their rights." When one looks at the map of the world and notes the places where British settlements have been made, one realises that there are few tribes which are not neighbouring to British settlements on one side or another, and that the definition of purpose by the old Parliamentary Committee was therefore wellnigh universal. So I think the Aborigines Protection Society has construed its function. It was itself certainly, as we in the United States came to know well, one of the real Congo Reform Associations, and it has been pretty well every special kind of a reform association in carrying out its stated purpose "to assist in protecting the defenceless and promoting the advancement of uncivilised tribes." It was fitting that the British Anti-Slavery Society, founded at almost exactly the same time, should amalgamate with it two years ago; for the work of the two societies has constantly run in parallel courses. Looking through the last number (January, 1911) of the quarterly journal of these united societies, I find that there is no other country whose race problems receive so much attention in its pages as my own. There is a long account of the gathering at the Whitehall Rooms last October in honour of Booker Washington. This is followed by a letter con

cerning the visit to Europe this year of Professor DuBois; there is a tribute to Julia Ward Howe and her services in the American Anti-Slavery conflict; and there is a long review of Sir Harry H. Johnston's book upon "The Negro in the New World," accompanied by a portrait of John Brown. Besides these things there is an article relating to certain work for the benefit of the MicMac Indians of Prince Edward Island. When your British Aborigines Protection Society is able to consider to this extent in a single issue of its Journal the rights and wrongs of the weaker races in America, it seems to me that you already have here in Great Britain what can easily be made the adequate British agency in such a group of societies as I desire to see established in the civilised nations, all co-operating in an international union for inter-racial justice. Some of us in the United States who were active in the Congo Reform Association were brought by that experience to feel the need of some such society of broader scope, like the Aborigines Protection Society. Our study of the wrongs in the Congo brought us sharply up against similar wrongs in other parts of Africa, and we began to hear of almost precisely the same evils in South America. We saw that we were dealing with only one aspect of a world-wide and persistent problem; and I think that no one felt this more deeply than Dr. G. Stanley Hall, the President of our Congo Reform Association. He had long been a careful and sympathetic student of the conditions of the less developed races and of the tyrannies and cruelties inflicted upon them by "civilised" brutality and greed. Professor William James had deeply felt the same and written burningly upon it at the time of our American iniquities in the Philippines. In meetings of our Congo Reform Association President Hall and others spoke of the need and possibility of some association of broader scope; but up to the present time we have not created such an association in the United States. What I urge here is the creation of such organisations in the United States and in every civilised country, to be leagued together in an international union.

In the United States we have, of course, had special societies to deal with our two great racial problems, those concerning the Negro and the Indian. Professor DuBois, who visits Europe this summer, represents the National Association for the Welfare of Coloured People, which is the most recently organised of various societies which have defined their purposes in similar terms, and some of which still exist. Professor DuBois is the most active worker in this new society, of which Mr. Moorfield Storey is the president, and whose officers and members are chiefly white men. The Constitution League of the United States, in which Mr. John

E. Milholland, almost as much at home here in London as in New York, has been perhaps the most active force, is another American agency which has been earnestly devoted to fighting the political oppressions and discriminations to which the Negroes in the South are still subjected. Our Anti-Imperialist League, organised to oppose the policy of our government in the Philippines, and of which Mr. Moorfield Storey is also the president, has become in very high degree, by the very exigencies of its problem, a kind of Aborigines Protection Society. There are various organisations among our Negroes themselves concerned with the sufferings and struggles of their race in America.

We have had for many years an Indian Rights Association, and for twenty years there has been held at Lake Mohonk an Annual Conference upon our duty to the Indian, attended by many of our best and ablest men, and resulting in immense improvement. This Conference has in recent years been so expanded in its scope as to take in the problems arising from our relations to our so-called dependencies-the Philippines here playing, of course, the most important part. There is no place in the United States better fitted, by the great traditions created by Conferences on International Arbitration, to become a centre for Conferences on inter-racial justice than Lake Mohonk. Its present autumn Conferences upon the rights of our Indians and the people of our dependencies might profitably be expanded into Conferences of this broader scope, with no prejudice, but only gain, to the special purposes which called them into being.

It is possible, however, that the centre for this broader work in the United States will be elsewhere. There has been started at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, during the last two years, the most intelligent and well-considered movement known to me in all the world bearing upon the particular problems of this Congress. The object of the Congress has been stated to be "the discussion of the relation of the peoples of the West and those of the East, between so-called white and so-called coloured peoples." I have been speaking chiefly of the relations of white and coloured races, viewing the coloured races as those coming within the purview of such students and reformers as those constituting the Aborigines Protection Society. To the discussion of such relations the Clark University Conferences will in considerable measure be devoted; but they will also be devoted to what may be called more specifically the relations between the peoples of the West and those of the East, and to those relations the two Conferences already have been devoted. The President of Clark University, as is well known to most scholars present here, is Dr. G. Stanley Hall, whom I have