Lachenal
International Peace Bureau
Secretary’s Office
Bern, December 9, 1896
Honored Colleague:
Every isolated effort of the friends of peace resembles those tiny globules of mist, the condensation of which will afterwards form the rain for which the caravan is yearning. These particles are not noticeable; no one heeds them, and when the cooling rain is falling the atoms that so patiently worked to constitute it are no longer remembered.
“Who cares for that,” say our faithful prophets, “if only it rains?”
For more than five years the Austrian Society of the Friends of Peace has been resolutely pushing forward, and its efficacy has been gaining in breadth without losing anything in depth. It will have a significant share in the final success of our united effort, and it desires, just as we all do, nothing else than that the law of international peace may some day appear as much a matter of course and as self-originated as the law of gravity and the light of the sun.
In those happy days the peace unions and peace bureaus will exist only as mere traces in the recollection of a few archivists, who will have made the discovery that there were, in that strange epoch of cannons, anti-cannon endeavors also.
Accept for yourself, honored colleague, and for your worthy fellow-workers, the assurance of my perfect consideration and high attachment.