September 28, 1898
The committee which has been assembled here concluded its labors to-day. The manifesto of the Emperor of Russia naturally formed the basis and suggested the direction of the proceedings.
On Sunday, the twenty-fifth, the Turin “Peace Days” began with the centennial jubilee of the Piedmontese statesman, Count Federigo Sclopis. In the vast Aula of the Royal University the festival committee and a great audience were assembled. The hall was packed.
General Türr conducted me to the front row and introduced me to the Mayor of Turin, Baron Casano, the governor, Marchese Guiccioli,—I could not help thinking of Byron, who loved a Guiccioli whom I used to know in Paris,—and the Minister, Count Ferraris. We sat in front of the desk. The cards of invitation bore the names of twenty-four eminent men as patrons of the festival; among them were Biancheri, President of the Chamber, Minister Vigliani, the presidents of the Roman and Bernese Courts of Cassation, the rector of the University, the president of the Academy of Sciences, and others.
Lawyer Luzatti was the first to take the platform, and he gave us a biographical sketch of Federigo Sclopis. He eulogized his services, and particularized as most glorious the part he played as chairman of the Alabama Court of Arbitration. Then the vice president of the Roman Senate, who is also chairman of the Roman Peace Society, spoke, and he was followed by our Frédéric Passy. He had been in his youth a friend of Sclopis’s, and was therefore able to tell much that was fresh and interesting about the life of the great man.
The meeting was over at noon. The rest of the day was devoted to social intercourse and the Exposition. Such visitors as had any taste for art were here afforded more delights than are often found in displays of this kind, for the galleries of sculpture and painting are better filled than usual, and in a great edifice, built like a coliseum, an orchestra of two hundred artists gave wonderful concerts.
But if I prove unable to tell much about the Exposition in general, who will blame a member of the Congress for that? Here old friends are discovered and new and congenial acquaintances are made, and this fact serves to promote serious conversation; so the Exposition park, with its many pavilions, is neglected; you sit down with your comrades round a café table and talk of the things that are in your heart. The manifesto first of all, but also everything else that is going on in the world; among other things, the Dreyfus affair, which just at this moment every one has more or less in mind. A delegate from Paris, Gaston Moch, who himself had been a cavalry officer and had served in the same corps with the exile, has much interesting information to give. Even as early as 1894 he had looked behind the scenes in the affair and had realized that the Jewish officer would not be endured on the general staff. A peculiar thing was also told us: In the summer of 1894, and thus before the charge was brought against Dreyfus, Le Journal published a novel as a feuilleton, in which a plot for the extermination of an unpopular comrade was devised and carried out: the smuggling into the intelligence bureau of a forged document and the like,—a whole chain of intrigues such as was actually adopted against the innocent man, just as if Paty, Henry, and the rest had taken the novel as a pattern to go by.
On Monday, the twenty-sixth, the delegates met for their first session in the Palazzo Carignan. The splendor of the Italian princely palaces is well known. The hall where we met is of sheer gold; the wall coverings are of gold, the doors and window shutters heavily gilded; adjoining, and also glittering with gold, is the historic chamber in which Victor Emmanuel was born.
As the president of the Bureau was obliged to go to Brussels to attend the session of the Interparliamentary Directorate, the chairmanship of our meetings was intrusted to the lawyer Luzatti. Though many letters of greeting arrived, I will cite only the Italian Prime Minister’s:
“Our country—on the ground of the principles that have inspired its regeneration, on the ground of its ideals of civilization as well as of its political interests—our country must desire that in international questions juristic reason may win the day over the appeal to force.