Their Boston contained 12,000 to 100,000 people, all more or less homogeneous in race and religion. Ours is a city of 600,000 people, showing great diversity of origin and character. About one in six Bostonians of to-day is of native parentage. The other five-sixths come from many lands, profess many shades of belief, exhibit many varieties of temperament and physique. Out of these differences, certain fine barriers, invisible walls of separation, have arisen. These may not be of our making; nobody may be really to blame for them, but they are there, forming lines of cleavage all about us. Such artificial divisions have been a serious obstacle to the growth of civic pride among us. They have positively hurt the city because they tend to raise false issues and split the population into cliques and factions. They lead to grotesque misunderstandings and distrust, so that when Ward 13 meets Ward 11 to-day, the one still instinctively looks for a monocle and the other for a brickbat. It is the special mission of the City Club to break down these misunderstandings and restore on a new basis the unity of spirit which Boston once displayed and without which it can never be strong. This it proposes to do not by trying to argue away existing differences but by bringing together men of all shades of opinion and then letting human nature take its course. Nine-tenths of the bigotry and proscription from which we have suffered in the past has been due to isolation and mutual ignorance. We have been altogether too exclusive, all of us. But that is the last thing the City Club aims to be. Its ambition is to be inclusive in the broadest sense. Its doors stand wide open to the four winds and the twenty-five wards of the city and those who enter will find the social strata decidedly mixed and the good old Burns motto, "A man's a man," inscribed in the very smoke wreaths that curl up from the ends of their cigars. In all this we are only emphasizing and hastening a manifest tendency of the times. We are all growing together by the natural force of association. A hundred thousand of our children sit side by side in the schools, a quarter of a million men and women are thrown together in business relations. Narrowness vanishes when men and women come face to face and learn that they not only need but like and respect one another. It is natural and fitting that this general tendency should find expression in a society like the City Club. I have advocated this idea for years, indeed I feel that my views as expressed to the founders had some little influence in starting this club. For among all the excellent clubs of Boston I do not recall any which has perceived this particular opportunity and undertaken the work which we hope to do. Our distinction is not merely that we make no distinctions, but that we purposely cultivate the greatest variety in our membership in order that there may be at least one social organization in the city which is thoroughly representative. The members of such a body cannot fail to gain in mutual understanding and in fraternity of spirit, and the club as a whole must surely wield an influence toward united and coherent action for the welfare of Boston. PEACE. PEACE DAY, MAY 11, 1907. In the coming month the nations of the world will turn their thoughts and attention to the Second Peace Conference to meet at The Hague. Upon the decision of that tribunal will hang the future happiness or sorrow of millions of our fellow beings. There will be none who will wait and watch for the final judgment of the assembled delegates with a deeper interest, a more fervent hope, or a fuller realization of the woe that war entails than the mothers of men throughout the world. It is they who in the final analysis of war will be found to have paid the dearest cost. It is they who have come to know the full meaning of Longfellow's lines: The tumult of each sacked and burning village, The prominent part played by women in the recent Peace Congress is theirs by right. And it is to united womanhood that we must continue to look for the guiding force to drive war and its horrors from the face of God's earth. It is through the efforts of such organizations as the Massachusetts Federation of Women's Clubs that this and similar reforms are to be advanced, and it is to the noblest of Boston's daughters, Julia Ward Howe, the honorary president of the Federation, that the chief honor of the work already accomplished belongs. In every movement instituted during the past hundred years that has had for its object the improvement of the moral or physical well-being of mankind, the citizens of Boston have ever been leaders. While it was here in the streets of our city that the first blood was shed for American Independence, here, too, was planned the first International Peace Congress in the world, which resulted in the meeting held in London in 1843. And although Philadelphia claims the honor of establishing in 1815 the first Peace Society for the promotion of universal peace, it was the following year that the Massachusetts Peace Society was formed under the guidance of Noah Worcester, Channing and Sumner. Here in 1869 was held the great Peace Jubilee under the direction of Gilmore. There were assembled on the Coliseum Grounds at that time an orchestra and chorus embracing musicians and singers from every quarter of the globe in a monster peace celebration, the memory of which remains unique in the world. In October, 1904, the International Peace Congress held its meeting here in Boston, where the entire movement for the world's peace as at present organized had its inception sixty-five years ago. In the discussion incident to the proceedings of the recent congress held in New York City it was gravely suggested by men whose education and training should have taught them better, that war was a necessary evil and would continue so long as man remained human. The utter fallacy of such a position is apparent to every reader of history, to every student of men. The truth is that war will continue just so long as nations or powerful individuals find in it a source of profit. It will continue until man has been taught to apply to the solution of international questions the same code of reason and law which he relies upon for the adjustment of his private affairs. No sane man desirous of collecting an account from a debtor would think of calling on him armed to the teeth and presenting to him the alternative of being shot to pieces or paying on the spot. Nor is any man's honor vindicated by his putting a bullet into him who assails it. He merely stops one tongue and adds the stain of murder to the honor he would defend. Yet this is exactly the attitude of nations; a demonstration of force is deemed necessary to back up each and every demand whether just or unjust. In a single generation, during the past century, the so-called Christian countries of Europe and America gave proof of their belief in the teachings of the Divine Apostle of Peace by slaughtering 2,200,000 of his creatures as a gory tribute to national honor. Aside from the homes made desolate, and the attendant suffering in varied forms resulting from these conflicts, the actual money cost has been computed at thirteen billions of dollars; a sum greater by a billion dollars than the total assessed valuation of the entire United States forty years ago. It seems a trifle strange, in view of the apparent earnestness of the various countries represented at the Hague, that the world's expenditures for purposes of war have increased at a greater rate during the past five years than for any similar period since 1881. Great Britain's expenses in this direction have more than doubled in the past twenty-five years; Germany's have trebled; Russia's have trebled; Japan's more than quadrupled, while the peace-loving United States has doubled its expenditures. Although President Roosevelt says we maintain but an infinitesimal army, our expenditures for its support have trebled in the last generation. Though it is claimed that our navy is not being increased in power, we are spending on it to-day $16.40 of each $100 appropriated by Congress for all purposes, as against $6.20 in 1885. Despite conditions, however, despite this enormous increase in expenditure for war by every nation on earth, the end of war as a means for settling international disputes is in sight. Thanks to the spread of education, the plain citizen, whose principal interest in the matter is to pay the cost, is beginning to realize that it is not he but the ship builder, the ordnance and armor plate manufacturer who reaps the profit. He is learning to question the wisdom of spending millions of money and sacrificing the lives of thousands of men for |