The artist Ten Kate to-day gives us a jolly dinner at the hotel Twe Steeden, where he lives during his sojourn at The Hague—his own home is the estate Epé. His lovely wife does the honors. Among the guests are Mesdames von Waszklewicz and Selenka, Herr von Bloch, Novikof, Dr. Trueblood, and A. H. Fried,—in short, a little Peace Congress in itself; and it is still more a Peace Congress when after dinner the door opens and in comes the Chevalier Descamps.
“Excuse the intrusion,” he exclaims; “my rooms are situated above this dining-room. Your jolly voices reached me up there, and when I asked who were celebrating a wedding downstairs I learned who were here, and so I come, uninvited, but as the bringer of good tidings; we had a splendid session to-day.”
He is surrounded and interrogated. He tells us the third committee has been that very afternoon wrestling with the question of the arbitration tribunal, and indeed, as Descamps assures us, in a very satisfactory manner. The plan broached in the well-known “memorandum to the governments” has been taken as a basis of the new scheme; and the firm intention of the majority of the members of the committee to bring the matter to a positive result was manifested in that session. Descamps himself has been intrusted with the report on the project. So the matter is certainly in good hands.
A call from Beernaert and his wife. He tells me with satisfaction the result of the session from which he has just come. The second committee, of which he is chairman, has voted to recommend the Brussels Treaty (an extension of the Geneva Convention of 1864).
“It delights me that you are delighted,” I replied, “but I tell you frankly that the question of the humanization of war—especially in a Peace Congress—cannot interest me. The business concerns the codification of peace. Saint George rode forth to kill the dragon, not merely to trim its claws. Or, as Frédéric Passy says, On n’humanise pas le carnage, on le condamne, parce qu’on s’humanise” (“Carnage is not humanized, it is condemned because men grow more human”).
“Vous êtes une intransigeante—an irreconcilable,” he remarks with a smile, and consoles me with the simultaneous progress of the Conference on the arbitration question, of which I know he is the steadfast promoter.
I received the following letter from the editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, to whom I had expressed my regret and astonishment that no correspondence from the Conference was to be found in a paper of such wide circulation:
Berlin, May 31, 1899
My dear Baroness:
Your kind letter of yesterday’s date compels me to inform you that, in the first place, we are not unrepresented at the Hague Congress, so that we are informed of everything necessary and worth knowing; and, in the second place, that, in view of the hostile treatment the members of the Congress have seen fit to accord the press, I consider it unbecoming to degrade journalism by dancing attendance on the various statesmen.