Emily Greene Balch
Emily Greene Balch
Emily Greene Balchwas an American economist, sociologist and pacifist. Balch combined an academic career at Wellesley College with a long-standing interest in social issues such as poverty, child labor and immigration, as well as settlement work to uplift poor immigrants and reduce juvenile delinquency. She moved into the peace movement at the start of the World War I in 1914, and began collaborating with Jane Addams of Chicago. She became a central leader of the Women's International League for Peace...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth8 January 1867
CountryUnited States of America
We speculate as to what is in store for us. But we not only undergo events, we in part cause them or at least influence their course. We have not only to study them but to act.
We have lived through the flood time of fascism and of the nazism which ran its meteoric course at a cost to mankind in suffering and waste beyond all computation.
Another cause of change, one less noticeable but fundamental, is the modern growth of population closely connected with scientific and medical discoveries. It is interesting that the United Nations has set up a special Commission to study this question.
Without a common loyalty to either a state or a church they have nevertheless a vast deal in common.
In listing these tendencies making for a new world, we must not forget developments in the religious or spiritual thinking and feeling of mankind, where also we feel a strong unifying trend.
A major one which no one can overlook is technological and based on inventions and discoveries which have altered the whole basis of production and deeply affected social relations.
These wars appear also to have given its death blow to colonialism and to imperialism in its colonial form, under which weaker peoples were treated as possessions to be economically exploited. At least we hope that such colonialism is on the way out.
There is a great interest in comparative religion and a desire to understand faiths other than our own and even to experiment with exotic cults.
The First World War, and especially the latest one, largely swept away what was left in Europe of feudalism and of feudal landlords, especially in Poland, Hungary, and the South East generally.
Let us be patient with one another, And even patient with ourselves. We have a long, long way to go. So let us hasten along the road, The road of human tenderness and generosity. Groping, we may find one another's hands in the dark.
The desire for liberty has also made itself felt as struggle against domestic tyranny or arbitrary rule.
Those who are rooted in the depths that are eternal and unchangeable and who rely on unshakeable principles, face change full of courage, courage based on faith.