, honorary president of the International Council of Women,
presented an official invitation from the managers of the Panama
Pacific Exposition to be held in San Francisco in 1915, endorsed by
the California Suffrage Association; the executive committee of the
National Suffrage Association of Germany extended an urgent request
for the conference and that of France for the congress. The answer was
referred to the board, and it later accepted the invitations to Berlin
and Paris. This had been the largest meeting of the Alliance. Never
had the prospects seemed so favorable for accomplishing its objects;
never had the fraternity among the women of the different nations
seemed so close. When they parted with affectionate farewells and the
bright hope of meeting two years hence in Berlin they little dreamed
that it would be seven long years before they came together again;
that during this time the world would be devastated by the most
terrible war in history and that the task must be once more commenced
of developing among the women of the nations the spirit of confidence,
friendship and cooperation.

EIGHTH CONFERENCE OF THE ALLIANCE.

On call of its president, Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt of the United
States of America, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance was
summoned to its Eighth congress June 6-12, 1920, in Geneva,
Switzerland, seven instead of the usual two years after the last one.
The reason for the long interim was given in the opening sentences of
the president's address on the first day: "It is seven years since
last we met. In memory we live again those happy days of friendly
camaraderie in Budapest. All the faces were cheerful. On every side
one heard joyous laughter among the delegates and visitors. Every
heart was filled with buoyant hopes and every soul was armored with
dauntless courage. We had seen our numbers grow greater and our
movement stronger in many lands and here and there the final triumph
had already come.... Alas, those smiling, shining days seem now to
have been an experience in some other incarnation, for the years which
lie between are war-scarred and tortured and in 1920 there is not a
human being in the world to whom life is quite the same as in 1913....
So we do not come smiling to Geneva as to Budapest."

On Sunday morning, June 6, for the first time in the history of Geneva
a woman spoke in the National Church, the Cathedral of St. Peter, and
standing in the pulpit of Calvin Miss