In 1904 a little institution that called itself “The International Congress of Freethinkers” announced that it would hold its annual gathering at Rome. The pope—the new pope, friend of the royal house—lodged a feeling protest with the authorities. The priests poured inflammatory rhetoric over their people until violence seemed inevitable. The Italian Government’s only reply was to grant the heretics all the privileges that were ever given to the great Catholic pilgrimages: to put at their disposal its finest institution, the Collegio Romano, and to send its Minister of Public Instruction to open the Congress. Veteran warriors such as Haeckel, Berthelot, Salmeron, Sergi, Denis, and Björnsen, gladly announced their adhesion. Paris sent a thousand delegates; Spain nearly a thousand; Italy her thousands. Whole municipalities in Italy and France (even that of Paris) took part. The Latin world was aflame with rebellion. We met, seven thousand strong, in the heart of Rome, and Rome—the jade—smiled prettily as we marched up the Via Venti Settembre, as it had smiled once on processions of Cybele, and then on processions of Catholics. Haeckel was greeted with a wild demonstration as he stepped on to the platform in the great _Cortile_ of the College. Straight and proud, white with age but pink with more than the freshness of a young man, he adjured them in futile German, in his thin, inaudible voice, to form themselves into a new Church, the great Association of Monists. Few heard and less understood him, but his name was on every heart and his reception superb. A week afterwards I picked up a London journal in an Italian hotel, and read—as hundreds of thousands had done—that a miserable Freethought conference had been held at Rome: that its rowdy proceedings had disgusted the scholars who had, in a misguided moment, lent their names to it. Thus are we informed at times. I remembered Sergi’s enthusiastic comments at the close. “E magnifico, e magnifico,” was all he could gasp. I remembered Haeckel’s exultation as we walked home to his Albergo Santa Chiara, and Berthelot’s deep joy. The same scholars, except Björnsen, took part in the Congress at Paris, in 1905, when 100,000 of us were nobly received by the Conseil Municipal. But Haeckel was too unwell to come. Nature has laid her hand on him at length, and bade him hang his weapons on the wall. He can but hope to remain a passive spectator for a few years more of that vast stirring of the Latin peoples which he has so much contributed to bring about.