[Nicholas Murray Butler, American diplomat, winner of Nobel Peace Prize, President of Columbia University.] Typed Letter Signed to Sir Willoughby Dickinson, discussing ‘the work of the World Alliance’, in which he is ‘greatly interested’.

Butler had been Taft’s running mate in the 1912 United States presidential election. Such was his standing in the US that The New York Times printed his Christmas greeting to the nation every year. He shared the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize with Jane Addams. The present item is not untainted by the pompous circumloctions what one critic described as Butler’s ‘interminable miasmas of guff’. 2pp, 4to. On aged and creased paper, with slight damage to extremities but with text completely intact. Signed ‘Nicholas Murray Butler’. He received Dickinson’s letter just as he was ‘leaving for Berlin on matters of common interest to us all’. From there he will head to London, where he will spend two July weeks ‘at the Berkeley Hotel in Piccadilly which is my usual stopping place’. He continues: ‘As you know, I am greatly interested in the work of the World Alliance and have recently discussed its undertakings and needs with some of our friends in America.’ He cannot see any support for the WA ‘in the immediate future’, other than through ‘some allotment from the Church Peace Union’. He explains in some detail how the ‘funds of the Carnegie Endowment’ are ‘entirely obligated in carrying forward work already in progress’: ‘Our Comité d’Administration in Europe has at his disposal a very limited allotment, and that the Comité is using to what it regards as the best advantage in the work that has been organised under his direction.’ Note from Swarthmore site: The Alliance was created in August 1914 at a conference in Constance, Germany, as an international organization that would work primarily to help Christian churches in its member countries influence their people and governments for peace. Its stated purpose was to organize the religious forces of the world so that the weight of all churches and Christians can be brought to bear upon the relations of governments and peoples to the end that the spirit of peace and goodwill may prevail, and that there may be substituted arbitration for war in the settlement of international disputes; friendship in place of suspicion and hate; co-operation instead of ruinous competition; and a spirit of service and sacrifice rather than that of greed and gain in all transactions between the nations. In consequence the Alliance worked on such issues as disarmament, racial and religious minorities, the League of Nations, conscientious objection, refugees, peace education and arms control.