RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Peace Movements
of The Herald of Peace. It has continued its labors and the publication of its journal ever since and is still one of the most active and influential of the peace organizations. In 1828 the American Peace Society, on the initiative of William Ladd, the American " apostle of peace," was organized in New York as a national society, to unify the work which the single societies had undertaken and to save the movement from failure because of the difficulty of keeping the local associations alive and active. The society has continued its activities ever since. It has a dozen branch and auxiliary societies in different parts of the nation, distributes widely its pamphlet literature and its monthly journal, The Advocate of Peace, and in all possible ways continues its propaganda. Several of the local societies, as for example those of New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, continued their work for a number of years, but finally were all either merged into the national society or ceased to exist. In recent years new local societies have been organized in New York, Philadelphia, and other cities.
During its first period, which lasted for about forty years, the peace movement exhibited great vitality and vigor. The reaction of sentiment against the direful scourge of war was strong and wide-spread. Peace organizations were effected all
up and down the Atlantic Coast, in
4. The First Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island,
Period, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania,
till 1867. South Carolina, and to a less extent
toward the interior of the country. Many of the foremost men of the first half of the century associated themselves with the movement, or gave it their hearty support. The same was true in Great Britain, where branches of the Peace Society were formed in different parts of the United Kingdom, and prominent men, both in and out of Parliament, made the movement felt far and wide in British thought. In the way of literature this first period produced much that was of fundamental and durable value. In addition to the peace papers — The Friend of Peace, The Herald of Peace, The Advocate of Peace — and many able addresses and pamphlets which were printed and widely circulated, this period bequeathed Dodge's treatise referred to above, N.Worcester's Solemn Review of the Custom of War (Boston, 1814), J. Dymond's Inquiry into the Accordancy of War with . Christianity (Philadelphia, 1834), W. E. Channing's Discourses, Emerson's Essay, Charles Sumner's The True Grandeur of Nations (1845) and The War System of the Commonwealth of Nations (1849), W. Ladd's Essay on the Congress and Court of Nations (Boston, 1840), William Jay's War and Peace (New York, 1848), Cobden's wid Brights' speeches and tractates, H. T. J. Macnamara's Peace, Permanent and Universal (Lonion, 1841), T. Clarkson's Essay on Doctrines and Practices of the Early Christians as they Relate to War (London, 1832), poems of Whittier and Longfellow, 5tc. Nearly all of this literature still has great influence in the support of the peace propaganda. This first period closed with the series of peace songresses held in Europe from 1843 to 1851, at London, Frankfort, Paris, and Brussels. From
this time for nearly twenty years the peace movement simply marked time. The war spirit, after nearly forty years of general peace, flamed forth anew. The Crimean War came on in 1854; the Italian-Austrian War in 1859; the American Civil War in 1861; the Prussian-Danish War in 1864- the Prussian- Austrian War in 1866; the Franco-Prussian War in 1870; and the Russo-Turkish War in 1878. It was a period of intense passions, of fierce gigantic struggles, of incalculable slaughter and destruction; and the spirit of peace had to wait till the storm of war had passed before it could do constructive work. The leading peace societies maintained their organizations, pubilshed their papers and issued their manifestoes, but the spirit of the times made their work difficult and for the most part ineffective.
Before this war period closed, however, the peace movement began anew. About 1867, under the inspiration and leadership of Hodgson Pratt of England, the movement began to take hold of continental Europe in a systematic way. Up to this time peace work had been nearly 5. Recent entirely confined to the United States Period, and Great Britain. The horrors and from 1867. economic waste attending and following the great wars above referred to had again aroused the intelligence and conscience of men to try to make the recurrence of such a period impossible. Following the establishment of the International Arbitration and Peace Association in London by Pratt and his friends, and the Workingmen's Arbitration League (since known as the International Arbitration League) by William Randal Cremer, came the organization of societies in France, Italy, Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, and elsewhere. In the United States at the beginning of this period the Universal Peace Union was founded in Philadelphia by Alfred Henry Love and his friends. Later came the German and Austrian societies and their branches. The organization of societies has steadily spread until to-day there are more than one hundred general societies with no less than four hundred branches, or in all about five hundred associations devoting themselves in the different countries to the realization of permanent international peace. Scarcely a year passes that some society, general or branch, is not organized. The latest of the important organizations are the Peace Society of Japan at Tokyo, with about two hundred and fifty members, composed of prominent missionaries and eminent Japanese citizens, and the Universal Peace Association of South America at Buenos Ayres, founded by the distinguished Seiiora de Costa, whose labor in securing the erection of the great peace monument, the " Christ of the Andes," has made her famous throughout the world. The Nobel Institute at Christiania, Norway, established in the years 1897-1900, in connection with the Nobel Peace Prize Foundation, with its splendid building, its large and growing library, and its able administrative committee, is one of the most remarkable outgrowths of the peace movement, and is fast becoming one of the most conspicuous and influential of all the centers of peace propaganda.
Peace Movements