During his lifetime he whom I lost said to me many dear and beautiful words, which are imprinted on my heart; but the loveliest are those which he spoke from beyond the grave, in his last will. After a few last instructions and directions it reads:

And now, My Own, one single word to thee: Thanks! Thou hast made me happy; thou hast helped me to win from life its loveliest aspects, to get delight from it. Not a second of discontent has ever come between us, and for this I thank thy great understanding, thy great heart, thy great love!...

Thou knowest that we realized within our hearts the duty of contributing our mite to the betterment of the world, of laboring, of struggling for the right, for the imperishable light of the truth. Though I go home, for you this duty is not extinguished. Thy happy recollection of thy companion must be a support to thee. Thou must work on in our plans, for the sake of the good cause keep up the work until thou also at last shalt reach the end of the brief journey of life. Courage then! No hesitation! In what we are trying to do we are at one, and therefore must thou try still to accomplish much!

Conclusion

I am going to break off these records of my life at this point; I cannot call that which has filled my days between the tenth of December, 1902, and the present time, life. To be sure, I heeded the injunction which came to me from beyond the grave, and I have worked on; and I have seen in the loom of time much of that red woof to which my thoughts and desires are directed. I shall go on to speak further of that, but not in connection with the other personal things commemorated here. Moreover, the events of the last few years are still too near at hand to furnish a satisfactory perspective.

Since my career, however, does not end with that date of sorrow—since I have not yet reached, as the will says, “the end of the brief journey of life,” I shall have much more to communicate concerning the further course of that movement in which I have found my life task.

In the last six years important phases have developed in the battle between the cause of peace and the cause of war: for instance, the Anglo-French entente; the series of arbitration treaties following one after another (some among them without the usual limitations); the outbreak and fearful catastrophes of the Russo-Japanese war; the Hull incident, which, through the application of an investigation commission instituted by the Hague Court, was prevented from developing into a world conflagration; Roosevelt’s action in restoring peace in eastern Asia; the entrance of the North American group into the Interparliamentary Union; the rising cloud between England and Germany; its dissipation through the exchange of visits of international corporations brought about by the pacifists; the further assignments of the Nobel prizes; the activity and expenditures of Andrew Carnegie for peace purposes; the peaceful separation of Sweden and Norway, the first example of the kind in history; the lessons of the Russian revolution; the recent proposal of the English premier, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, for a union to limit armaments; the calling of the Second Hague Peace Conference; the Interparliamentary Conference at London, at which, for the first time, members of the Russian duma participated, though on account of the dissolution of the duma they were obliged to withdraw (La douma est morte, vive la douma!); the labors and congress of the Universal Alliance of Women for Peace and Arbitration under the chairmanship of Lady Aberdeen; the Second Hague Peace Congress, this time including representatives of forty-six countries, with the wedge still further driven in by doubters and opponents determined to change the character of this world parliament so that it shall come to be merely a court to regulate wars; the favorable results, nevertheless, of this Conference resulting from the spirit of the cause and promoted by our adherents who were present; the brilliant début of the South American countries which were represented in it; the determination to continue this international coöperation; the progress of the anti-dueling movement assisted by the King of Spain and the King of Italy; the resolutions passed by the socialist congresses in favor of fighting against war; the increasing number of ententes, in which the adherents of the old views, and with them the press of almost the entire world, suspect that they can see aggressive alliances formed against third parties, but which in reality are merely new meshes of the net making for the peaceful organization of the world; the conquest of the air, the most revolutionary event of recent centuries in the development of civilization, but in which the shortsighted see nothing else than a useful means of hurling explosives, although it really involves the abolition of boundaries, fortifications, and customhouses; at the same time the conditions in the miserable Balkan states, where for long years brigandage and manslaughter and atrocities have been raging and the war storm may break at any moment.

I have not held myself aloof from all these things; I have chronicled them in my diaries with notes, documents, and correspondence. During these last six years I have been about the world a good deal and met many interesting people. For four winters in succession I have spent several weeks as the guest of the Prince of Monaco in his crag-seated castle, and have there met prominent personages from princely, scientific, diplomatic, and artistic circles. A journey to America[[49]] brought me into touch with Roosevelt, and opened before me vistas into that country of unbounded possibilities, or, rather, as it presented itself to me, of impossibilities overcome. I have participated in the meetings of congresses during that time, namely, the Peace Congresses at Boston, Lucerne, Milan, and Munich, and the Woman’s Congress at Berlin. I attended as a guest the Interparliamentary Conferences at Vienna and London. I have had frequent meetings with my old colleagues, and I have seen new laborers in the common cause come to the fore: for instance, Richard Bartholdt, founder of the American group; Sir Thomas Barclay, the zealous associate promoter of the Anglo-French entente; Lubin, the initiator of the Agricultural Institute at Rome; and Bryan, the candidate for President of the United States. I have been enabled to follow the great services rendered the peace movement in Germany by Pastor Umfrid, by Professor Quidde, and by many others—I cannot name them all. In the year 1905, accompanied by Miss Alice Williams, I made a lecture tour through twenty-eight German cities. In the spring of 1906 I had to go to Christiania to deliver there before King Haakon and the Storthing the lecture required of the recipients of the Nobel prizes. At that time I made a journey through Sweden and Denmark. Finally, in 1907, just as eight years earlier, I was present at The Hague during the time of the Peace Conference, and kept an exact record of all the transactions, personages, and social functions. All these experiences, impressions, letters, and memoranda may sometime come into use for supplementing the reminiscences (so far as they bear upon the historic development of the peace movement) which are here brought to a conclusion; and, should I not myself arrange for their publication, they will be found among my possessions after I am gone.

What the immediate future will produce in this domain will assuredly surpass in significance the modest and hidden beginnings. Though the contemporary world is quite unconscious of the fact, the movement has spread far beyond the circle of the Unions, of the resolutions, and of the personal activities of single individuals; it has grown into a struggle which involves the very conception of life and all natural laws. It has passed from the hands of the so-called “Apostles” into the hands of the powerful and into the minds of the awaking democracy; within it work a hundredfold various powers, unconscious that they are thus working. It is a process which is being accomplished by the forces of nature, a slowly growing new organization of the world. The next stage is to be something quite concrete, perfectly attainable, absolved from all theoretical and all ethical universality,—the formation of an alliance of European states.

Whatever the old system may accomplish by its endeavors, however insanely high the supplies of the opposing instruments of destruction may be heaped up, whatever horrors may break out in isolated places in the way of warlike reactions, I have no fear of being discredited in histories written in the future when I here register the prediction, Universal peace is on the way.