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HON, STANFORD NEWEL.

F. W. HOLLS.
HON. ANDREW D. WHITE. CAPT. ALFRED T. MAHAN. HON. SETH LOW.
THE AMERICAN DELEGATION TO THE PEACE CONFERENCE.

CAPT. WILLIAM CROZIER,

THE

NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE.

NEW SERIES.

AUGUST, 1899.

VOL. XX. No. 6.

I

THE INTERNATIONAL PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE.

By Benjamin F. Trueblood.

N 1869, in the preface to the French edition of Bluntschli's "International Law Codified," Mr. E. Laboulaye wrote these significant sentences: "Steam and electricity have so mixed peoples up, so run together all civil and commercial interests, that men have clearly seen all the horror and folly of war, all the wisdom and beauty of peace. By repeating, with every possible variation, that labor and exchange are the law of the world, that therein only are found the happiness of peoples and the greatness of states, economists have everywhere propagated ideas promotive of peace. Publicists have followed them in this fruitful path. The political ideal has changed, and so changed that we are not far from having done with the old, destructive admiration which our

rism, to carry to the ends of the earth the blessings of labor and of peace,such is to-day the great ambition of peoples. It must be made that of kings and ministers of state."

There may be doubt as to whether Laboulaye's estimate of the ambition of peoples was not much too high for his day, or even for ours. But the same thought has, in one way or another, been repeated by a multitude of pens since he wrote. If he were living now he would certainly feel that, with the progress that is being made toward the constitution of the different peoples into a world-society, kings and ministers have ripened, beyond his expectation, into peacemakers. The International Peace Conference just held at The Hague furnishes abundant proof of this.

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THE CZAR OF RUSSIA.

fathers had for those scourges of humanity called conquerors. Napoleon is decreasing; Washington is increasing. To abolish war, or at least to limit it and cut off some of its barba

It was an emperor who issued the great peace manifesto calling for the conference. "The oldest queen in the world and the youngest queen in the world," as a preacher at The

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Hague felicitously referred to Victoria and Wilhelmina, are strongly, almost passionately devoted to the peace ideal. The other sovereigns of Europe, the Emperor of Austria, the

King of Italy, the Queen Regent of Spain, Oscar of Sweden and Norway, and most of the rest are not, as a rule, one whit more given to love of war than their subjects. The presidents of nearly all the republics of the world are quite as advanced in their ideas of peace as the peoples whose representatives they are. When Nicholas of Russia asked for the Peace Conference, these sovereigns and presidents responded with a readiness and earnestness with which the peoples hardly kept pace.

As to Laboulaye's ministers of state, won to the ideas which he attributed to peoples, if he had been at The Hague he would have found them there. One of the most satisfactory and significant features of the conference was the evidently sincere and earnest and what, as the deliberations went on, showed itself to be the persistent wish of most of the members to do something real toward the promotion of a better understanding between the nations and toward laying the foundations of a durable peace, out of which should come ultimate disarmament. There may have

ENTRANCE TO THE HOUSE IN THE WOODS. been something of policy and self

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interest in this wish; there were reputations at stake, and national honor too, though of an order somewhat novel; it would have been wholly unnatural if motives of this sort had not played their part in keeping the men of the conference up to their duty. But any one who came into contact with them and watched their course from day to day as to the objects before them, as I was permitted to do to SO considerable

an extent, was forced to believe that the motives which actuated them, with exceptions, of course, were a sincere regard for the good of the world and a true desire to use the occasion before them, to the fullest extent possible, for the promotion of that good. They were representatives of

the governments and peoples from which they had come; they felt deeply their responsibility to that large and growing public sentiment in all the civilized nations, which is loudly demanding durable peace and relief from the ex

ning to end; but it was true no less of a large number of the silent men who only listened, thought and voted. Hereafter, therefore, it may be expected that peoples on the one hand, and kings and ministers of state on the other, will move together in the attainment of what Laboulaye calls the blessings of peace and of labor.

It is somewhat difficult to speak of a conference which one has seen only from the outside. But the inside of a thing can often be very well judged from the outside. This is peculiarly true of assemblies of men, which in these days have no secrets. The attempt was made in the beginning to keep the proceedings of the committees and sub-committees secret. But this was found to be practically impossible. The lead

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WILHELMINA, QUEEN OF HOLLAND.

hausting burdens of incessantly growing armaments. But they were, many of them at any rate, more than this; they were representatives of themselves. They thought, spoke and acted as if the affair which they had in hand had been their own. This was distinctly true of the leaders in the deliberations, to whom was due in no small measure the admirable spirit which pervaded the conference from begin

ing speeches were, either "for substance of doctrine" or literally, in the newspapers before they were cold. Members would talk "confidentially" to their friends, and these to others.

So it came to pass that the enterprising men of the press, some of whom, in spite of the dearth of news, persisted in staying and "hunting the hard fox," to use one of Mr. Stead's phrases, succeeded in giving to the world the purport of the daily deliberations, of course with many glosses of their own. The outcome was that the secretaries of the committees were authorized to

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