Imagine a congress convened for the enfranchisement of slaves; would a convention then be necessary in regard to the treatment of the negroes, concerning, for instance, the number of blows that might be meted out to them when they should show themselves lazy in the work of the sugar plantations?
Or in the movement against torture as a means of securing justice, would the agreement that the oil to be dropped into the victim’s ears should be heated only to thirty degrees instead of up to the boiling point have been a stage on the way to the goal, or rather a tarrying on that other way which was to be abandoned?
June 9. My Own waked me with a kiss and a warm “I thank thee!”
“What for?”
“That thou wert born!”
Yes, quite right,—it is my birthday. That does not interest me, but what is going to be born here,—national justice; that takes my whole mind captive. Yesterday was devoted to the work of the third committee on Article X of the proposal for a court of arbitration,—namely, the article that shall determine the cases in which appeal to the court of arbitration is to be obligatory, cases which “do not touch either vital interests or the honor of states.” There again the back door, or rather a barn door, for the entrance of war. He has good defenders here, the brutal fellow!
Great dinner at the residence of our ambassador, Okoliczany. My neighbors are the Russian chargé d’affaires and M. Pichon, assistant secretary of the French Delegation,—a young lieutenant with a saucy little mustache. But he has understanding, and sympathy for our cause, and is a great admirer of D’Estournelles. He acknowledges that the world is progressing, and that a coming civilization will have no more room for war; only he defends the colonial policy of war. He himself has been in the Sudan.
June 10. It is hard for me to keep up with my correspondence. I have never before in the course of a whole year received so many letters, telegrams, and voluminous writings as now, while I am here at The Hague. They announce schemes, proposals, infallible methods for securing peace. And all of this I am expected to make comprehensible to the delegates! Inventors of airships and flying machines send me their plans and prospectuses. By the conquest of the atmosphere the boundaries with their customhouses and fortifications must needs disappear, opine these aëronautical letter writers.
Or is it true that the ministers of war are hurrying to build air fleets? and to form flying regiments of uhlans? All new inventions are invariably employed by the war authorities. And yet I am firmly persuaded that every technical improvement, especially all means of easier communication, ultimately lead to universal peace.
Yesterday the arbitration committee took up Article XIII of the Russian plan, calling for immediate consideration of the question of a permanent tribunal, and that, too, of a tribunal not merely in posse but in esse.