CATT, Carrie Chapman
SPEECH, ARTICLE, BOOK FILE
Article: Why Wars Must Cease, Introduction

[*Chap in Why Wars Must Cease*]

INTRODUCTION
by 
Carrie Chapman Catt
---
"If my soldiers would really think,
not one would remain in the ranks."
          Frederick the Great

The writers of this book bring an indictment against war.  
They pronounce the entire war system false in its theory, barbarous 
in its application, and ruinous to the growth of civilization in its 
practice.  Whatever may be said concerning war as a factor of evolution
in earlier times, it is now certain that no benefit will accrue 
any nation involved in war hereafter that equals the calamitous price paid for it.

When the world war came, there lay behind it a possible
million years of warfare.  Apparently, from the beginning, a never 
ceasing competition between warring peoples has furnished a chief 
and constant occupation to men, each group striving to devise a 
more cunning strategy and more deadly weapons of destruction.  Each 
victory won aroused anticipations of another; each defeat 
spurred the hope of a successful retaliation.  At this moment, with 
memories of the World War and its tragedies fresh in the minds of 
older citizens, bugles are calling men to the drill in expectation
of another war.  Mussolini has told his soldiers that they must now 
make their minds ready for war, because it is surely coming.  Italy 
does not name the enemy she fears, but hints that it may be a combination 
of several.  Austria, unarmed, is aroused to defense by her 
sleepless dread of Germany. Hitler expresses hopes for peace, but 
his neighbors believe that he merely waits to complete more adequate 
preparation for war.  France, never having known the security she 
longs for, is preparing her defense against the expected return of 
German armies.  Great Britain is perturbed and worried over the outlook. 
The smaller countries are watching and waiting in nervous
apprehension while over the entire European Continent still lower 
the ominous clouds of the War Depression with its unemployment, its 
doles, its lost incomes, its reduced money values, its continued 
threat of fresh revolution and its unhappy populations.  On the other 
side of the earth, Japan audaciously "rattles the saber" at its 
big neighbor, and Russia, not wanting war at this time, is being driven 
to expect it.   The United States looks on and solicitously wonders 

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whether she can keep out of another world war when and if it comes. 
All the world around, men and women are trying to live normal lives,
but they move in heart sinking despondency.   No nation has paid the 
cost of the last war and no nation has recovered from its effects.  Taxes 
rise skyward in all lands and demands for relief funds for the unfortunate 
continue unabating.  Every nation is overrun with crime and 
immorality.  The most sickening humiliation of all the war distresses 
is the fact that there have been many men who have betrayed trusts 
and cheated or robbed their fellow men, although they had been regarded 
as honest and honorable citizens.  Over all is the dread of 
another war before some measure of recovery from the last has been 
achieved.  In the words of G.P. Gooch, the English historian, 
"The danger lies in the mass of inflammable material scattered over 
the globe and the number of irresponsibles who are playing with the 
match box."  These are a few of the effects that compose, in part, 
the price paid for war.

Similar facts concerning past wars must have been familiar 
to many men in every nation in 1914; yet they were not mentioned when, 
one after another, thirty-two nations slipped into the Great War 
without much ado.  In a special session of Congress, called for the 
purpose on April 6, 1917, after sixteen hours of speech making, 
designed mostly for home constituents, the House, at 3:12 A.M., 
entered the war by a vote, 373 to 50.  Four days later, the Chairman 
of the Ways and Means Committee introduced the first Liberty Bond Act 
with these words: "This bill contains the largest authorization of 
bond issues ever contained in any bill presented to any legislative 
body in the history of the world." The war ended November 11, 1918, 
one year and seven months after our entrance into it, but in that 
short time our expenditures, it was announced, would have paid the 
entire cost of the United States Government from Washington to 1914. 
Or the sum expended on our participation in the Great War would have 
carried on the Revolutionary War for more than a thousand years at 
the rate it actually cost.

It is, therefore, a mobilization of common sense that the 
world now needs.  Is there a man or a woman who possesses a modicum 
of this mental quality?  Let him mobilize his own faculties and retire 
to the closet where once men and women were wont to pray.  There let 
the aspirant apply what common sense he has to the Facts of War,

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facing them fairly and squarely, considering them with such logic as
he can command. Possibly, a great national convention will be held
one day, all the delegates qualified by the possession of super
common sense. The first topic for such a convention would be this:
"Every nation in the world is spending from eighty to ninety-five
cents in every dollar of its income on wars past, present, or
future. The Government of the United States announced at the close
of the Great war that it had spent sixty-seven billions of dollars since
its foundation and of this amount fifty-eight billions had been spent
for wars. Is that a sensible, practical, or logical policy for an
enlightened nation?" Such a convention would shout a unanimous "NO".
The second topic would be more difficult: "Can war be abolished and
if so, how and when?"

The facts of war appall. Archeologists have been digging
into the buried secrets of ancient peoples since the Great War and
have unearthed old battlefields all around the world. The Marne, it
appears, has been a field of combat since earliest times. Below late
battlefields, others have been found, and beneath these, still others.
Here, 20,000 years ago, cave men fought other cave men and 1,400 years
ago, the Romans and Visigoths gave Attila his greatest defeat. In
this Western Hemisphere, too, are old battlefields where men, forgotten
now, their race unknown, left only a single record, -
here they fought and died. How many advancing, aspiring civilizations
have been obliterated before their time by tribes, perhaps
ruder and less advanced, will remain a mystery.

These scientists tell us that three thousand years before
the coming of the Prince of Peace men made war weapons of metal,
chiefly bronze, and that after the manufacture of each new type of
weapon, wars became deadlier and more destructive. Wars did not
decrease after Christendom. Instead, they grew more terrible, each
proving more bloody and destructive than the previous one.

The most startling fact about the World War is that it was
a Christian war. Christians began it and Christian nations kept it
going. More, Christian nations had brought the war system to the
climax which made the World War inevitable.

Imperialism had virtually come to an end by August 1914.
There remained little, if any territory that had not been coerced
under a white nation's overlordship. Primitive men or backward

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people had been enlisted from these new possessions in the armies of
the white man where they had been taught modern methods of making war.
Modern methods had replaced the bow and arrow and throwing stick and
had found their way into remotest regions. To Europe in 1914, wrote
Sir Philip Gibbs: "Indian princes sent their cavalry. Colored men
came in battalions from the West Indies. East African Negroes, under
white officers, fought in the jungle against Germans, also commanding
Black troops. Chinese came to build roads. No race was absent."
All human beings were thus embraced in the Christian White Man's war
system. No nation, no tribe, no man, could escape it. Conscription
or the draft, developed in the previous half century, could seize and
compel a man to fight another man, also conscripted, neither knowing
why there was a war. If a man called himself a "conscientious 
objector", he might speedily find himself in jail or prison camp.
(Foot Note. In Great Britain, 16,100 "conscientious objectors" were
reported. In the United States of America, the War Department
announced that there had been 3,989 and 450 were sent to prison by 
Court Martial.)

Every nation, large and small, had its war machine as well
organized and as efficient as its war chest permitted. So sensitive
was the war trigger that any nation, tribe, or even a single man,
could have started a war at an hour's notice, but no human power, however
great, could have stopped it when once it had begun. War was
regarded, and still is, as a respected necessary policy among nations,
an institution of honorable status in all constitutions and parliaments.
Alliances between two or more nations had divided the Continent of
Europe into two war camps, each armed, trained, and ready. Had not
the heir to the Austrian throne and his wife been assassinated at
Sarajevo, another cause would soon have been found. Nowhere did the
"people" know that a war was imminent. A few men of high position,
some historians have said the number did not exceed eleven, gave the
final decision for war and men from farm and factory, bank and
university, [*from fine continents*] were marched to the front, no one of them having the
right or privilege to demur.

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THE WEAPONS

A hectic competition between these modern nations for the
invention and production of new weapons of destruction had been in
progress since the Franco Prussian war of 1870. When the armies
gathered for the World War, they came with rifles lighter in weight,
quicker in action, and more easily loaded than those of any previous
war. A variety of new cannon was introduced, carrying heavier
projectiles, [*and*] propelling them farther and faster. Germany astounded
her enemies when, in her march on Paris, she revealed the largest
gun yet made, called the "Big Bertha". Machine guns were new and 
terrible with automatic action and far more destructive of life than
any gun used before.

Submarines were not newly invented, but had not been 
successfully employed in previous wars. No nation, unless it was
Germany, anticipated that they would be an important factor in the
World War; nevertheless, 57 German submarines sunk 8,500,000 tons
of British shipping. During the war 5,408 ships were sunk, totaling
11,189,000 gross tons and 203 submarines were destroyed. All the
chief powers produced submarines before the war closed. (Encyclopedia
Brittanica, Vol. 21, page 499.)

Airplanes were new and regarded as too imperfect to prove
a significant factor among the fighting equipment, yet, before the
war had gone far, they were probably the most dreaded of all the
forms of destruction. As many as 300,000 persons found refuge in
the underground railway tube in a single raid. 1,413 persons were
killed in British raids and 3,407 were injured. A night raid stopped
work at munition plants in a wide area and some 200 planes and well
trained pilots, about to be sent to the Continent, were kept at home
for defense. Much property was destroyed. (Encyclopedia
Brittanica Vol. 1, page 461.)

Tanks, a wholly new instrument of war, were introduced by
Great Britain. The Germans captured one and imitated it. Soon every
nation had them.

Submarine chasers, anti-aircraft guns, and gas masks,
countering equipment, were hastily invented and used by all the armies.

Poison gas was not newly invented, but it had not been employed 
as a war weapon before. At the Hague Tribunal a convention

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had been adopted prohibiting the use of poison gas and airplanes in time
of war. Yet poison gas and airplanes were introduced by the Germans
and adopted as soon as possible by all the chief participating
States. "Gas casualties in the French Army were estimated at
190,000; those in the British Army, 180,000; those in the American
Army, 70,552 or 27% of all our casualties." (The Air Menace and
The Answer, page 25.)

The telephone, displayed for the first time at the Centennial
Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, was of hourly service. Motor vehicles, displayed for
the first time at the Chicago Exposition in 1893 as the "horseless
carriage", now appeared as motor ambulances, trucks, and automobiles,
and were of great service on both sides in speeding the processes of
battle. Barbed wire served as protective entrenchments for both
armies. The food blockade was a strategy particularly powerful and
inhuman since non-combatents were probably the chief sufferers.

"When all was over" wrote Winston Churchill, "torture and
Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific,
Christian states had been able to deny themselves; and these were
of doubtful utility."

THE FIGHTING MEN

The War System demonstrated its ability to mobilize a
colossal army. According to Gibbon, the Roman Army, under Caesar,
guarding a mighty Empire, extending from the Euphrates to the Thames,
did not exceed 400,000 men. The army of Napoleon (Beck. - Evidence of
the Case), terrifying all Europe and part of Africa, did not exceed
700,000 men. It is said that had all the able-bodied men, old and
young, been enlisted in the armies of Great Britain and America at
the time of the Revolution, the total could not have exceeded
4,000,000 men. The population, having vastly increased meanwhile,
the armies of North and South, in the four years Civil War, approximated
4,000,000 men. The British sent a great army to South Africa
in the Boer War, but it did not exceed 300,000 men.

In the World War, thirty-three millions of men were engaged
on the side of the Allies and twenty millions on the side of the
Central Powers, or fifty-three millions of men as a total. Had all
the men in the entire world - 360,000,000 - been gathered in one spot,
one in every seven men would have marched away to produce that
fifty-three millions.

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"The United States enlisted 4,800,000 men and sent 2,000,000
to France. In July 1918, 10,000 men were being sent over daily and
306,000 were sent during that month, - four times as many men as
there were on both sides of the battles of Waterloo or Gettysburg"
writes Frederick Palmer. That these young Americans were not yearning
for war is indicated by the report to the Military Committee of
the Senate that many thousands who went to the front never had fired
a rifle.

THE DEAD

When such a gigantic army, equipped with more destructive
weapons than any previous army had had, [*went into war*] it is not strange that the
dead doubled in numbers those killed in all wars of the preceding
one hundred and twenty years. (From 1790 to 1913 the total death
loss was 4,449,300.) Field Marshal Sir William Robertson, chief of
the British General Staff during the World War, is sponsor for the
statement that the dead in the Great War numbered 10,873,000. He
adds that if the victims of army and navy blockades, of revolutions,
of sunken and shipwrecked boats, of bombardments, be added to this
list, the number of dead would mount to 37,000,000. Others raise the
total still higher.

OTHER CASUALTIES

Number of persons wounded    20,297,551
Prisoners and missing                5,983,600
War Widows                               5,000,000
War Orphans                              9,000,000
Refugees                                   10,000,000

These last named were old men, women, and children, of many
nations fleeing from homes, hungry, thirsty, tired, worried, marching they
know not where or why.

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THE MONEY COST

One of the first tasks that the League of Nations set itself
was to ascertain the cost of the World War. It officially announced
that cost to have been $187,000,000,000 or $93.50 for every man,
woman and child in the entire world. This was the first time that 
the cost of war had been officially determined and publicly announced.
The Geneva statesmen further calculated the cost of the World War
to have exceeded that of all war added together since Christendom. 
The cost of the World War applied only to the opening of war, period
of combat, and the return of the armies to their homelands. General
Tasker Howard Bliss estimated that the war "cost the nations concerned
a total of $337,946,176,657" (page 385, "What Really Happened
at Paris"). James M. Beck, in his "War and Humanity," printed in 1917,
announced that the entire wealth of this country, including all its
property, mines, and private fortunes, was $250,000,000,000. If he
was right in his estimate and Tasker H. Bliss was correct in his
estimate, then the war cost more than the wealth of the United States.
The war costs did not end there. In our own country, there was
interest to be paid on Liberty Loans, pensions to soldiers, hospital
care for wounded, gassed, and disabled, and relief for millions of
men and women unable to secure work or robbed of income by the
universal business depression which settled upon every nation. The
cost to the United States of its share in the World War was
$22,000,000,000 exclusive of $10,000,000,000 loaned to the Allies
and, as yet, unpaid.

The National debt at the close of the Civil War, January
1866, was $2,750,000,000 although it was estimated that the cost of
that war was a sum equal to all the expenses of the government from
Washington to Buchanan. The National debt increased $23,000,000,000
between 1914 and 1919. The rise in the cost of war is evident in
this comparison.

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THE WAR DEPRESSION

A financial and business impotence, called a Depression,
follows every war. Nations have curiously neglected to investigate
with scientific accuracy the nature, the cause, and the cure, of
these effects of war. A suspicion is justified that the real
reason for the lack of information concerning them is a desire to
conceal the fact that such periods of financial distress are normal,
unpreventable results of war.

Take 4,800,000 men, one man from every five in the nation,
and put them in camps or march them away to war. With few exceptions,
they had been producers; now they are unproductive charges upon the
Government which much supply them with food, transportation, clothes,
shelter, and arms. The Nation next urges that "all possible efforts
shall be put into the production of things required by fighting men",
such as khaki cloth, buttons, uniforms, shoes, kits, caps, masks,
rifles, fresh, dried and canned foods, medicines and hospital
supplies, automobiles, trucks, ships, and all kinds of munitions.
The war over, new orders go forth. "Stop the war industries and
return to peace production." The economic machinery of the Nation
is not flexible enough to respond to such tremendous changes. Add
wild extravagance, mad speculation, rackets, dishonesty in high
places, over-abundance of credit, and the chief causes of all war
depressions are found.


The World War included more nations, cost more money, and
enlisted more men, than any other in the world's history. Naturally,
it was followed by the most extensive, disastrous, and stubborn
depression within the knowledge of men. A War Depression is often
a severer shock to a nation than the War itself. Civilization might
survive another War, but it is doubtful if it could withstand
another Depression.

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OTHER FACTS

(1) A wit, after the war, said; "No one knows who started
the war, who won it, or who will pay for it." He thought his
comment humorous, but he spoke a tragic truth. Wars rarely settle
a professed cause of war. How wasteful, then, is the adventure!
Instead of a settlement, wars leave fresh irritations behind them
which grow into an excuse for another war.

(2) Wars invariably arouse savage instincts and lower the
standard of morality, toleration, and decency. The evidence is manifest
in conversation, both in good and in cheap literature, movies,
and theatres.

(3) Children are often demoralized by the excitements of
war with the result that there is a heavy increase in juvenile misdemeanors
and crime.

(4) Wars are followed by a costly increase in the quantity
and brutality of crime.

(5) "Lowered vitality, due to food conditions, overwork
and overstrain, plus sorrow and worry, increases insanity, sickness,
and death among civilians."

(6) The number of dead in any war is astounding, but the
fact is more shocking when it is vastly increased by incapable
leaders, untrained men, inferior weapons.

Upon all of the above facts books have been written,
all convincing that war is a gross human error.

THE NEXT WAR

That there will be a "Next War" seems apparent. When
it will come; what nations will start it; where it will be fought;
no one knows. That it will be more hideous than the last one, all
military authorities predict. They further agree that no weapon
or equipment used in the last war will be abandoned in the next
because it was too brutal. On the contrary, every nation will have
improved each instrument of war by making it more powerfully destructive,
if it can. More, it will invent and produce new weapons
that will be more deadly than any yet used, if possible.

Already several nations have announced that they now
have a gas more poisonous than any used in the last war. The United

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States of America told the world, in the closing months of the war,
that it had discovered Lewisite, a gas more destructive than any used
in the war, but had refrained from producing it. Now, however, it
has outdone itself, by announcing two new poison gasses, each more
destructive than Lewisite! All the chief powers have advertised
the fact that they now have a larger "Big Bertha" than the Germans
had. Larger submarines have been constructed, much improved in
mysterious ways and made capable of propelling larger, heavier
torpedoes than any used in the last war. A brisk competitive race
in the building of airplanes has been in progress. Many military
authorities have declared that the next war will be fought in the
skies. At the close of the Great War, no nation possessed airplanes
in excess of one hundred. At the close of the year 1931, a statement
of the number and character of airplanes then possessed by each
nation was made by the League of Nations. At that date, France had
2,375, Great Britain 1,434, Italy 1,507, Japan 1,639, the United
States 1,752, the total of these five nations being 8,707. Since
that date, the race for quantity, size, and equality, has continued,
but nations refrain from frank confession as to their present air
equipment. The correct number owned by each nation is difficult to
ascertain because airplanes have been accidentally destroyed, purposely
abandoned for better designs, and many new types have been built
without known value. There has been much building of Naval vessels,
also, and our own authorized program of Naval ships totals something
more than a billion dollars.

What new weapons may appear with the coming of the
Next War is the dread of all nations. In time of war, if nations
are equally equipped with men and destructive weapons, war means
"a tragic game of mutual extermination". If one nation has fewer
men than its opponent or possesses inferior killing weapons, war
means certain defeat for that nation with tremendous casualties.

Either some policy must be devised to postpone or to
prevent this coming war or there will result a titantic disaster to
the entire human race, more appalling than the world has yet known.

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WOMEN

Women represent the other side of the War controversy.
Although, for thousands of years, women at times in large
numbers as actual participants, they were more often the unfortunate
victims of war. Gradually, a rule developed that women and children
should be classed as non-combatants and that all armies should
protect them from harm as an act of courtesy. Theorectically,
this rule was respected by the more highly civilized nations, but
it was rarely observed in time of war. Consistency led the chief
nations, including our own, to treat their own women as non-combatants
and they forbade women, by law, from taking part in war. A
new turn in the attitude of military men toward women took place in
the World War. Women had taken the places of men in considerable
numbers in all late wars, but there arose such a desperate demand in the Great War
for more men at the front that women were urged for patriotic
reasons to supply the places made vacant by the enlistment of
soldiers. Five millions of women slipped into men's places in
Great Britain, eight hundred thousand in munitions alone. In the
United States, one million five hundred thousand women were
engaged in war industries; one hundred thousand of them in munition
plants and forty-five thousand were clerical workers in Washington
alone.

Women in the Central Powers, even those in Turkey, were
employed in the same character of work, but figures of the number
engaged are not available. Lord Balfour said in this country in
1917: "Behind every men in the trench, there are ten persons
making it possible for him to stay there, and at present seven of
the ten persons are women." General Jofre said: "We have two armies,
one in the trench, and one behind the trenches. The one in the rear
is composed largely of women." So wrote General Tasker H. Bliss:
(page 374, "What Really Happened at Paris") "A nation in arms is a
nation of combatants, men, women, and children - some drafted to the
front, the labor of others commandeered and directed to maintain the
former."

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It has been repeatedly predicted that in "The Next War"
women, as well as men, will be conscripted in order to release the
largest number of men for the army. No protection to women as non-
combatants will be offered. The new weapons of airplane bombs,
poison gas, and disease germs will threaten the lives of women and
children in every warring nation. An enemy country, grown desperate
enough, would agree with General Ludendorff and carry out his theory.
He said: "All the means to weaken an enemy nation become legitimate.
By killing women and children, for example, one destroys future
mothers and eventual defenders of the country." Women are advised
by these grim developments to transform their traditional attitude
of helpless surrender in time of war to one of determined opposition
to the entire war system. War does not creep upon a nation as did
smallpox before vaccination. It comes because the people of the
nation do not prevent it by the expression of disapproval. That
disapproval, to be effective, must be united, bold, unhesitating and
supported by thorough understanding.

War is man's institution and, instinctively, women have
expected men to discover its unsoundness and to bring it to an end.
The majority of men are hesitant, however, and evade this responsibility.
Apparently, they feel a loyalty to war, because it is their
institution. Very many men have appealed to women to take the lead in
the movement to abolish war. Perhaps they have felt as did Matthew
Arnold when he said: "If every the world sees a time when women shall
come together, purely and simply for the benefit and good of mankind,
it will be a power such as the world has never known."

Should a united womanhood set its resolution firm and
immovable for the abolition of war, the opportunity would be provided
to demonstrate whether women could be an invincible power. Could
women really end war? They could, and if men will not, they must.
How? By compelling the nations of the world to face squarely the
savage, bloody, disillusioning, de-civilizing Facts of War. Women
can produce this result if they will, but first they must themselves,
know the Facts. The Facts presented in this small volume are well
authorized and will serve as a first lesson.

[*Why Wars Must Cease          1935*]

FOREWORD

Ten years ago a few of the more important women's national
organizations in the United States united in a National Committee on
the Cause and Cure of War. None of the organizations was a peace
society and only one had a functioning peace department. By way of
experiment a conference was held to which many of the best informed men
of this and other nations were invited to explain why men fight, why
wars continue, what are the causes of wars, and where conscientious
students of the subject could find a method to release nations from
this ruinous custom.

Now ten conferences have been held in as many years. Delegates
have come from every site. Regional, state, and local conferences
have been held and have passed the findings of the National conference
to these groups. A Reading Course was early established to confirm facts
set forth at the conference and to aid in the further investigation into
the cause and cure of war. The national organizations in this Committee
number eleven; the membership is numbered in the millions. Each organization
now has a department on international relations, but without
uniform title. Programs upon various phases of the cause and cure of
war have been heard in many national and state conventions while very
many local clubs or societies make a frequent feature of such programs.

In the first national conference it was reported that two
hundred and fifty-seven reasons had been actually recorded in history as
the cause of a past war or wars. The National Committee on the Cause and
Cure of War, however, finds that the real cause of modern wars is the
maintenance of the organized war system with its competition in armaments,
strategy, and prestige.

On this tenth anniversary of its existence, the National
Committee on the Cause and Cure of War issues this book WHY WARS MUST

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CEASE as a result of a decade of investigation, research, study,
discussions and conclusions.

Questions

1. Shall organizations be asked to sign this?
2. Should it be submitted to the organizations?
3. Should the list of organizations be merely printed
without reference to this forward?

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