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Once each state originated and maintained its separate postal tax. But in the Nineteenth Century, as soon as commercial relations upon a large scale between states became possible, it was seen that some form of mutual postal regulation was necessary. The system first chosen was one "to make the foreigner pay." Ridiculously high rates were thus imposed upon the country of dispatch, the country to which the letter was sent and any intermediatory country through which it might pass, as well as a sea tax. For instance, at one time there were three different rates between Germany and Austria. Once, "a letter sent from the United States to Australia was confronted with the fact, arrived at after some calculation, that the postage would be 5 cents, 33 cents, 45 cents, 60 cents, or $1.02 per 1⁄2 oz., according to the route by which it was sent." (Reinsch, Public International Union.)

Many years elapsed before the world agreed to put an end to this confusing variability of tariff and to submit its Postal regulations to a superstate control. Each nation feared, as it fears to-day in the idea of political federation, that the proposal carried a hidden menace to sovereignty and nationality so abysmal is the egotism of states! But economic necessity at last put to rout national vanity, and in 1878 the Universal Postal Union, with an elaborate form of International machinery, was established, with headquarters at Berne,

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Switzerland, where it has since continued to function. Its Congress of Plenipotentiaries may meet every five years or when demand is made by two-thirds of the Congress, each country having one vote.

Naturally its rules frequently have to be amended. An amusing occasion necessitating change is related by Woolf in his International. Government. The Bible Societies of England and America publish more Bibles than any other book, dispatching them in large numbers to the Orient where the Mohammedan does not reciprocate by sending us his sacred literature, the Koran, thus equalizing the postal exchange. Great Britain and America, naturally, retain the revenue on these shipments. But travel in Persia - the land of philosophers and poets, but not the land of Pullmans and Postmen-is slow and costly. camel is still the ship of the desert, and the transportation of tons of Bibles by strings of camels became a threatening national expense, religion and bankruptcy arriving by the same shipment, as it were. At a recent conference, a Persian delegate drew the attention of the Congress to the injustice and the cost of transportation was more equally distributed.

The

So interdependent have nations become that the year before the war saw two hundred International Congresses, embracing science, the arts and industry, held in Europe. Facts like these speak louder

than words and offer argument for the creation and maintenance of a political framework to uphold and sustain the world's well-established economic exchanges.

It may appear that the earnest consideration of these subjects, the reconstruction of our Foreign Policy, the protection of our existing forms of international activities, are too intricate and far from home for women to embrace

women who largely heretofore have found their most weighty considerations to be whether they should serve beef or mutton for dinner, if they belonged to the well-to-do class, or whether they could afford to buy meat at all if they dwelt below the hunger line. But are these problems in reality distant since they may bear the seeds of future wars? every mother who has given a son to German aggression, answer. Let every women who has had her heart and hearth desolated by war, reply!

Let

CHAPTER III.

THE OLD BALANCE OF POWER.

"The book of Kings is closing and the book of the people is opening." Edwin Markham. Victory Address.

HE alternative to a League of Nations is

a return to the system known as the Balance of Power, a system which the peoples of the world had thought the war had discredited, but which, as late as December 30, 1918, M. Clemenceau publicly declared he had not entirely renounced.

Women who would forever end war must realize clearly what this principle did for Europe and civilization, even, although it was an honest effort to co-ordinate states.

The Balance of Power was a system intended to preserve so perfect an equilibrium between states that no one state would have power to enforce its will upon the rest. Each state was supremely sovereign, jealous and as a rule so widely separated from its neighbors that there was little thought of reciprocity. The maintenance of this theory became a fundamental of diplomacy and an axiom of political science. If a state

attempted to overturn it and make laws for the rest, it was held to be the right and duty of every Power to interfere and put down such domination even by force of arms.

In order to give our consideration to this principle in operation, it is essential to regard it with European, not American, eyes. Accustomed as we are to living with vast contingent plains of unoccupied territory and among 110,000,000 people nearly all of whom eventually become naturalized, and where there is but one accepted language, the task is not easy. We must picture the European continenta peninsula of Asia-swarming with sixty distinct nationalities speaking almost as many tongues; we must see these peoples, in various stages of development, crowding and overflowing onto each other's doorsteps, stepping upon each other's cherished traditions and settling their national disputes as disputes as they had settled their individual disputes before the law forbade — by blows. We must observe the fever-spots of Europe that have long bred war. Turkey, the threshold to the East, the Ottoman Empire that has created unrest in Europe for centuries and that must continue to offer a field for aggression until its future is guaranteed by international agreement; the Balkans, whose ever-present war-clouds have appeared once a week on the horizons of our Sunday press, to be absorbed with our morning coffee and as quickly forgotten. And we must

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