Preparation for the Congress by the Belgian government · Houzeau de Lehaye · A reminiscence of the battlefield of Sedan · Concerning free trade · Audience with King Leopold · Invitation to the Interparliamentary Conference · Reception the evening before · Pithy sentences from Rahusen’s address · Opening · “No other cause in the whole world....” · Second day of deliberation · Stanhope · Gladstone’s proposal · Debate over the tribunal plan · Dr. Hirsch puts on the brake · Rejoinder by Frédéric Passy and Houzeau · Randal Cremer · Concluding festivities in Scheveningen
My memory retains as the most important events of the year 1894 our participation in the Sixth Peace Congress at Antwerp and in the Interparliamentary Conference which followed immediately at The Hague. Another festal journey into unfamiliar countries, and another stage of progress in the triumphant march of an Idea!
Before the assembling of the Congress the Belgian Minister of State, Le Bruyn, laid before King Leopold a report setting forth the remarkable growth of the movement and adducing as a proof of it the fact that in countries like Austria and Germany, which hitherto had held aloof from the cause, great peace societies had sprung into existence and found fruitful soil. The king’s reply to this report was the establishment of a committee whose duty it should be to forward the labors of the Peace Congress that was to meet at Antwerp. The committee, composed of thirty members, included the most distinguished names in Belgium, in large part officials connected with the government.
The opening session took place on the twentieth of August, in the great hall of the Athenæum. We had arrived the day before, and had looked about a little in the commercial metropolis of Belgium, and had spent the evening in pleasant intercourse with several of our friends who had journeyed thither from all parts of the world.
Our new president, Houzeau de Lehaye, was in the number,—a lively little man, full of wit and possessing the gift of fascinating eloquence. As chairman he conducted the proceedings with tact and firmness, and whenever in succeeding Congresses he took part in the debates, as he was particularly apt to do if any obstacles had to be avoided, one could always depend on his tact.
“Twenty-four years ago,” Houzeau told us that first day, “I visited the battlefield of Sedan. I have the impression of it still before me,—those corpses, those temporary graves, those flocks of ravens, the troops of maddened horses tearing over the plain, the wounded and dying lying in their gore, the teeth clinched in the agony of tetanus, the columns of prisoners of war, the heaps of discarded weapons, and in the midst of a grass plat the brass instruments of a military band surprised by the enemy in the climax of the saber song from ‘The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein.’ And I saw white sheets of letter paper, covered with the simple messages of love of mothers and sweethearts, flying round in the autumn wind until they fell into lakes of blood; and the horrible vision of countless bones and bleeding flesh all trodden down into the mire.... The peasants had fled from their villages across the neighboring boundary, and were then returning slowly to find misery and ruin, to which they would later have to succumb; and this,” he added, as he concluded his reminiscences with restrained passion, “is this to be the sum of civilization?”
Houzeau de Lehaye is a decided advocate of free trade. In his opening address, in which he depicted the errors and prejudices lying at the foundation of any defense of the institution of war, he said:
There is still another error which does not indeed involve a brutal battle of saber and cannon, but nevertheless is not much less calamitous. In spite of all the counter-evidence of the political economists, in spite of repeated results based on experience, yet how widespread is the prejudice that a nation becomes poor when the prosperity of neighboring peoples makes too rapid advances. And in order to preserve an imaginary equilibrium they hasten to have recourse to a protective tariff. And this war of the tariffs is not less destructive than the other. By a righteous retribution this weapon chiefly wounds those that wield it. And all these errors have their foundation in the false notion of the source of wealth and prosperity. It is worth while to note that there is only one source,—labor!
One would think that such simple truths would not require to be stated at this late day, for it is clear enough that wealth can be increased only from the creation of material things and not through mere change of place,—from Peter’s pocket into Paul’s; a transaction which, in addition, often means the destruction of the values shuffled this way and that. But the simpler, the more self-evident a truth is, the more it is wrapped up in the veils and fogs of old prejudices and current phraseology, and therefore it does much good to hear it once again spoken out so frankly and clearly.
This time there was a Portuguese at the Congress,—Magelhaes Lima, the publisher of the radical-liberal newspaper O Seculo. From America came Dr. Trueblood, who has never missed any of the European Peace Congresses.