The Days of a Man 1914 



Time to oppose war is before it begins. 'The only way you 

 oppose can k ee p out of the war," the wise Belgian manu- 

 facturer, Henri Lambert, assured me, "is to stop it 

 before you get in." 



But James Brown Scott, secretary of the Endow- 

 ment and a director of the Foundation as well, 

 urged at the beginning a quietism more complete 

 than seemed to me necessary, expressing his atti- 

 tude as follows: "It is the present duty of the Amer- 

 ican Peace Society 1 to withdraw as it were within 

 itself, and wait until the world is again ready for 

 its message." As will later appear, I felt that so 

 long as we were still on solid ground the friends of 

 peace should make themselves heard. Meanwhile, 

 however, conditions in Europe grew worse and worse, 

 German officials becoming more and more blindly 

 brutal; and most peace lovers were forced to admit 

 that there might come a time when we should enter 

 the war on the side of the Allies rather than see 

 military autocracy dominate Europe. That America 

 America could not permanently hold aloof seemed evident, 



as a 



yet many hoped that she might remain a "City of 

 Refuge Refuge" and do her part by means of conciliation, 

 arbitration, and reconstruction. 



On our way back to California we made as usual 

 a brief but enjoyable stop in Chicago at the home of 

 my wife's brother Charles, and another visit of two 

 or three days in Provo (Utah) with our son Knight 

 and his wife, whose wedding had occurred about a 

 year before. This was the result of a romance I 

 had myself in some sense brought about, though 

 quite unwittingly. 



1 To which we all belonged. 



C 650 ] 



