So I am ready to believe that a book against war, appearing at the beginning of the seventies, when the intoxication of victory still effervesced in Germany and the wrathful clamor for revenge still raged in France, would have had no success whatever. The cult of arms, too, had to attain those huge dimensions whereby it has since then harnessed the peoples under its heavy yoke, it had to have brought the world to the brink of ruin, in order that the watchword “Away with Weapons” might find so powerful an echo.

Every day brought me reviews from far and near,—feuilletons and editorials. Bartholomäus Carneri published a ten-column article in the Neue Freie Presse, J. V. Widmann a series of five feuilletons in the Bund. I received criticisms from Russia, where the book appeared in five different translations,—one of them authorized by me,—criticisms from America, from England, from the Scandinavian countries, where even in its first year translations were made.

I was now brought into living touch with all those who were connected with the peace movement, or who, having had their attention drawn to the existence of such a movement by my book, were now joining it.

The following letter afforded me especial pleasure, The inventor of dynamite wrote me:

Dear Baroness and Friend:

I have just finished reading your admirable masterpiece. We are told that there are two thousand languages—1999 too many—but certainly there is not one in which your delightful work should not be translated, read, and studied.

How long did it take you to write this marvel? You shall tell me when next I have the honor and happiness of pressing your hand—that amazonian hand which so valiantly makes war on war.

Nevertheless you make a mistake to cry “Away with Weapons,” because you yourself make use of them, and because yours—the charm of your style and the grandeur of your ideas—carry and will carry much farther than the Lébels, the Nordenfelts, the De Banges, and all the other implements of hell.[[21]]

A. Nobel

In a Reichsrat debate on the military budget (April 18, 1891) Minister Dunajewski, of the Department of Finance, spoke the following words: