Nobel owned a tiny aluminium motor boat, in which we took delightful trips around the lake in his company; the silvery craft darted swiftly over the waters without rocking. We sat leaning back in comfortable deck chairs covered with soft plaids, let the magic panorama of the lake shores pass before our eyes, and talked about a thousand things between heaven and earth. Nobel and I even agreed that we would write a book together, a polemic against everything that keeps the world in wretchedness and stupidity. Nobel was very strongly inclined to Socialism in his views: thus, he said it was improper for rich men to leave their property to their relatives; he regarded great inheritances as a misfortune, for they have a paralyzing effect. Great accumulations of property should go back to the community and common purposes; the children of the rich should inherit only so much that they could be well educated and kept from want, but little enough so that they should be stimulated to work, and through this to renewed enrichment of the world.
The days in Zurich went swiftly. Trips on the lake, excursions to places within and without the city, during which I admired the opulence of the villas that fringe the city, which all look more like castles.
“Yes, the silkworms have spun all that,” said Nobel.
“Perhaps dynamite factories are even more profitable than silk mills,” I remarked, “and less innocent.”
“Perhaps my factories will put an end to war even sooner than your Congresses; on the day when two army corps may mutually annihilate each other in a second, probably all civilized nations will recoil with horror and disband their troops.”
It was his belief that scientific progress and technical discoveries are destined to regenerate mankind. “Every new discovery,” he wrote me once, “modifies the human brain and makes the new generation capable of receiving new ideas.” From a letter of Alfred Nobel’s which was not addressed to me, but came under my eyes, I copied the following passage; it gives a glimpse into his philosophy of life:
To spread the light is to spread prosperity (I mean general prosperity, not individual wealth), and with prosperity will disappear the greatest part of the evils that are the inheritance of dark ages.
The conquests of scientific investigation, and its ever-widening field, awaken in us the hope that the microbes—the soul’s as well as the body’s—will gradually disappear, and the only war which mankind will wage will be the war against these microbes. Then Bacon’s splendid phrase that there are deserts in time will be applicable only to times that lie far back in the past.
On our departure I had to reiterate my promise to keep Alfred Nobel regularly informed about the progress of the peace movement; and from that time forth, though (alas!) I never saw him again, I corresponded with him indefatigably in regard to the cause of peace. As a testimony of how quickly and eagerly he became interested in its behalf I include here a letter which he wrote me a few months after our meeting in Switzerland:
Paris, January 7, 1893