Peaceful Pacific Relations

The Maui, steaming out of the Golden Gate, was like a vessel going on a voyage of discovery. Aboard her, a little knot of a score or so Americans constituted the band of adventurers--a strange and motley crew, a handful of college presidents, as many professors, Y. M. C. A. officials, editors, a business man or two, a few politicians, a couple of women. At their head, Captain of the little band of elite and erudite adventurers, x-student at Frankfort-on-the-Main and Munich, Ray Lyman Wilbur, President of Leland Stanford Jr. University, gazed westward across the western ocean.

He leads his comrades to the first "peace maneuvers" in the Pacific, across the same waters to the same islands where his elder brother Curtis Dwight, Secretary of the Navy, had been holding, only a few days before, war maneuvers. The younger Wilbur heads the U. S. delegation to the first meeting of the Institute of Pacific Relations at Honolulu.

What is this Institute? It is not known yet. It is not known yet. On July 1, it comes into being for the first time. Two years ago, the Y. M. C. A. conceived the idea, in imitation of the Pan-Pacific Union, a local organization in Hawaii, but turned over the conception to a more general group for execution.

So backers were obtained and money raised. The names of Bernard M. Baruch, John Davison Rockefeller Jr., former President Burton of the University of Chicago, President Lowell of Harvard, William Cameron Forbes, onetime (1909-13) Governor-General of the Philippines, were secured as endorsers. A U. S. delegation of 25, headed by Mr. Wilbur and including William Allen White, Prof. George H. Blakeslee, Prof. Jeremiah W. Jenks, Prof. W. W. Willoughby, President Mary E. Woolley of Mt. Holyoke College and others, gathered. Similar efforts were undertaken in other countries--in Australia, Canada, China, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, the Philippines. A list of problems of the Pacific was prepared and each national group undertook preliminary study.

Entirely unofficial, the object of the Conference is to improve Pacific relations and get rid of problems by understanding and enlightenment of public opinion. If the 1925 conference is a success, another conference is planned for 1927.