June 5. The editor of the Dagblad has granted Stead the first pages of his paper for the publication of a daily chronicle of the Conference. To-day the first number appeared. Excellently prepared. Will be of great use. A splendid man, this Stead. First his nine months’ campaign in writing and speaking, and now this labor!
A seventeen-year-old son of Vasily’s calls on me. He brings an album, on the cover of which appears in relief the word “Pax,” and he is getting all the members of the Conference and the friends of peace who are here to write their names in it. How many high military officers will immortalize themselves in the Pax album! And the impression made on this youth will certainly never be effaced. In what an entirely different way the generation that will succeed us will approach the idea of universal peace—they who will have been witnesses of this idea rising up and forcing its way into official circles and into the foreground of contemporary history. In our youth such a thing was either quite unknown or made a matter of ridicule. If this boy who is making a collection of contemporary autographs under the rubric “Pax” shall sometime obtain office and honors, perhaps have to speak a weighty word in the political questions of the future, then he will think very differently from our grizzled politicians about the cause of national justice, and if at that day a new official Peace Congress should be called, in which he and his like should have to give their votes, then the proceedings would be attended by many less doubts and difficulties than can possibly be the case with the present Conference, the first of its kind.
June 6. We move down to Scheveningen to the Hotel Kurhaus. It does not take us long to get settled. At the end of two hours our corner drawing-room looks as cozy as if it had been occupied for two years—thanks to the kindness of the manager, Herr Goldbeck, who permits us to arrange everything in our rooms just as we please. The prettiest furniture of the as yet rather empty hotel is put entirely at our service. Great studio windows occupy nearly all of two walls. One, opposite the door, frames a picture of the sea; at the other the red silken shades are pulled down and cause the whole room to be bathed in a ruddy glow. Flowers in vases, in jardinières, and in pots; splendid baskets of fruit, pineapples, melons, grapes,—the last a delicate attention of Herr von Bloch’s; books, pamphlets, maps, newspapers.
At yesterday’s session M. Descamps reported on the work of the committee. Léon Bourgeois presided. How pleasant that now Stead’s chronicle contains all these details of the sessions and the authentic texts of the articles proposed. Now one can follow the course of events quite accurately. An agreement has been reached regarding several articles of the Russian proposal concerning good offices and mediation.
Only there stands in the articles the fatal clause, “If circumstances permit.” Here is clearly seen the result of compromise, which is generally contained in the text of resolutions of such committees, composed of advocates and opponents of any cause. Only under the condition of a rider which robs the main article of its universal validity will those of the other party give up their opposition. The back door is saved, and that is the main thing with them.
Arrival of Baron Pirquet. He has been in Brussels, where the council of the Interparliamentary Union held a session in order to lay out a programme for the Conference that is to take place in August at Christiania; and he brings a letter from the Union to the colleagues that are attending the Hague Congress.
Pirquet breaks the news to me that my cousin Christian Kinsky, in whose house we had spent so many pleasant hours, had died suddenly a few days before.
In the evening Bloch’s second lecture. He depicts the difficulties that would attend the mobilization of the modern millionfold armies. After the first fortnight of a war of the future a tenth part of the armies—not counting the wounded—would be in the hospitals. He also cites a statement made by General Haeseler: “If the improvement of firearms continues, there will not be enough survivors to bury the dead.”
This lecture, like the first, was interrupted by a recess for conversation and refreshments. We talked with Léon Bourgeois about events in Paris. There, it seems, a band of young men of title (Boni de Castellane and others) attacked the President’s hat with their canes. Bourgeois grants that this is disgusting; “but,” he adds, “it is no more dangerous than the foam on the seashore.”
June 7. At yesterday’s session the deliberations of the first committee (on the laws of war, weapons, etc.) had the floor. Concerning this I make no entry in my diary. The securing and organizing of peace have nothing to do with the regulation of war, nothing at all—quite the contrary! It is desired—that is, it is desired by many—that the opposition between the two ends be abolished; they desire that the one be substituted in place of the other! They are driving in the wedge that shall split the work of peace.