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288
THE CRISIS

hearing the many interesting local reports. The chance listener might've been a little puzzled at the purport of the meeting and the meaning of the reports, but if he had known the local work which these women were doing he would have looked upon the meeting is the smallest and least significant part of a tremendous movement.

The critic would see lost scratch that the critic would see much lost opportunity in a meeting of this size. It ought to be reduced to small intimate conferences with carefully threshed out information and judicial weighing of facts. Broad messages of inspiration should come in the mass meetings and in many ways the critic could suggest ways of utilizing this force of 500 representatives from nearly every state in the union, to greater advantage than was done at Wilberforce. But after all, critics do not make the world and here is this vast fact: that in 50 years the work of social uplift among colored people has been taken in hand by its women and is being done with remarkable efficiency and astonishing results.

Of course, the human side, the women themselves, are the striking part of the meeting of the sort. No group of women in the world have suffered more from irresponsible and judicious detraction than the colored women in America. In the meeting at Wilberforce one could see perhaps the fairest general representation of the forward moving women of this race. It was at a meeting of idlers and fadists, and it was not "fashionable" in any sense, and indeed, the social side of the session was perhaps too much neglected; but the women were well dressed, very much in earnest and evidently represented wide extremes of education and economic condition. There were those there who would have looked at home on Fifth Avenue and beside them efficient -looking housekeepers and good-natured mothers of large broods. There were severe-looking public speakers and timid and hesitant young graduates with reports done in blue ribbon. They were, in short, good, wholesome, intelligent women showing both independence and conventionality and capable of most interesting conversation.

The men present were few and far between. There was a former Register of the United States Treasury, the President of Wilberforce University and the Superintendent of the Normal and Industrial Department; those were all invited to address the session, and Richard Harrison read. Taking all in all, it was a convention to be remembered.

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(Over) AT WILBERFORCE, OHIO, AUGUST 5-8, 1914

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EDITORIAL
OF THE CHILDREN OF PEACE
Come, all my father's children, and sit beside my knee, here with this child of mine, and listen:

Have you ever seen a soldier? It is a brave site, is it not? Once upon a time, many, many years before your dear little curly heads were born, I remember seeing an army that marched because a King was visiting an Emperor. Berlin was joy mad. Houses streamed with color and music reeled and rioted. Then came the Army. Tall, handsome men, all gold and silver and broadcloth, sworded, spurred and plumed, led on horses that curvetted and tossed their shining bits. (Do you not love a horse with his great, sweet eyes and quivery, shining softness?) Next came the soldiers, erect, rigid, "Eyes left!" Pit-pat, pit-pat! Clasping their little innocent guns. Next came the artillery: files of wildly prancing horses dragging long leaden things. How the crowd roared. The King bowed to the Emperor and the Emperor bowed to the King, and there arose a great cry of pride and joy and battle from the people. With that cry I seemed suddenly to awake. I somehow saw through; (you know sometimes how you seem to see, but are blind until something happens and you really see?"

I saw then what I see now. I saw and see the WAR that men said could not be.

Gone was all the brave tinsel, the glitter, sheen and music. The men trudged and limped, naked and dirty, with sodden, angry, distorted faces; their eyes were sunken and bloodshot, with murder in them; they staggered over corpses and severed arms and feet and dead horses and they carried — not little innocent guns, but little innocent children; they dragged, not pale and leaden guns, but pale and bounden women, and before them staggered and crept old women and grandfathers, the sick and the maimed, the weak and half-grown boys and girls.

I heard the cry that hovered over this fearsome army: it was a wail of hunger and crime, of thirst and pain and death, and the cry rose and met an answering cry that came from beyond the forest to the West.

Two toddling children slipped from their fathers' arms and met in the gloom of that forest, with the beasts coward and livid, disbodied hands seemed to creep in the darkness.

"Mother," they whispered.
"Mama," they cried.
"Mütterchen," they sobbed.

Wild with horror two bound mothers beat their naked hands against the gun-carriages, groping and struggling through the gloom, as death flamed through their hearts.

Then the armies met. Two fathers leapt from the two armies ahead and each seized the other's child. They strangled and crushed and maimed and