On the seventeenth of September I had the honor of being received by the President of the United States, and of having a private talk with him about the cause which is so dear to my heart. Friendly, sincere, evidently thoroughly impressed with the seriousness and the importance of the matter discussed,—so seemed Theodore Roosevelt to me. Gallant Soldatentum—even more, adventure-loving Roughridertum—is in his blood, but he has a far-seeing social good will in his spirit; and this last makes him the pioneer of a new era. He was the first to put into action the tribunal of The Hague; he is now going to call a new Hague Conference.
“Universal peace is coming,” he said to me; “it is certainly coming—step by step.”
It would be unbecoming in me to repeat what was said in an unconstrained conversation; only the following I might be permitted to state here. I had mentioned the Anglo-American Arbitration Treaty that came so near being concluded in 1897, and suggested that the present would be an appropriate moment for taking it up again.
“I have the intention,” replied the President, “of inaugurating treaties, not with England alone, but with all nations,—with France, Germany—”
“Do not forget my Austria,” I interrupted.
He smiled. “And Austria and Italy, and England of course. But England should not be the sole and only one, else the treaty might be misunderstood as an alliance of the English-speaking races. It is America’s duty to make treaties simultaneously with all civilized nations. And I contemplate one other thing, namely, that these treaties shall be more far-reaching in their scope, and with fewer limitations, than those already concluded in Europe.”
The President said among other things that he especially admired Austria’s acquisition of power in Bosnia; he called this “a feat.”
I went from Washington directly to Cincinnati. Cincinnati is a manufacturing city, therefore somewhat gray and smoky, but nevertheless it is surrounded by a girdle of smiling villas and is provided with a public garden which, not without justification, is called Eden Park. The lectures of the peace delegates were delivered in a concert hall which holds four thousand people, and which on that evening was filled to overflowing. The heads of the official departments, among them a bishop, delivered the introductory addresses, and I was given the flattering surprise of seeing, over the platform, the title of my book gleaming in electric letters, “Lay Down Your Arms.”
On our way back we stopped at Buffalo, and from there made an excursion to Niagara Falls. One thing with which I might reproach this splendid spectacle of nature—and yet it is not its fault—is the circumstance that around the raging waters, on the steep, wooded banks, there stand, in place of Indian wigwams, modern villas and hotels, and—worse yet—on a plateau mirrored in the rolling flood a billboard, twenty meters long, calls the attention of pilgrims to Niagara to a certain species of biscuit! On the other hand, it is bewitching when from various positions brilliantly colored rainbows, accompanied by others of paler hues, appear and vanish and hover over the rising mists like veils.
I brought my visit to America to a close with a visit of several days in Ithaca at the house of the former ambassador, Dr. Andrew D. White. Ithaca and its famous university is a little world in itself.