On the Sunday before the opening of the congress, special services were held in many of the Boston churches and the peace movement was discussed by distinguished preachers from Europe and America. In the deliberative sessions, which were held in Faneuil Hall, the Old South Meeting House, and other places, the first session being opened by an address by Secretary of State John Hay, the following topics, among others, were discussed: the work and influence of the Hague Tribunal; the reduction of the armaments of the nations; education and the peace sentiment. But here, as in every previous congress, the two topics to receive primary consideration have been arbitration and disarmament. At all times there has been the urgent appeal to the nations to abandon the brutality and injustice of war and to adopt the humane and just methods of peace. In response to the resolution adopted at St. Louis, President Roosevelt, on October 20, 1904, invited the nations which had taken part in the first Hague conference to another conference at the same place. But in his message to Congress of that year he defined very clearly his own position, condemning in no uncertain terms the thought of peace at any price. "There are kinds of peace," he said, "which are highly undesirable, which are in the long run as destructive as any war. The peace of tyrannous terror, the peace of craven weakness, the peace of injustice--all these should be shunned as we shun unrighteous war." [Illustration: Building appears to be a church.] Building where the second Peace Conference was held, The Hague, Holland. Favorable replies to the invitation sent by President Roosevelt were received from all the nations. Russia, then in the midst of war with Japan, while approving, stipulated that the conference should not be called until the end of that war. When peace was restored, in the summer of 1905, Emperor Nicholas II issued an invitation to fifty-three nations to send representatives to such a conference. For the first time, nearly every independent nation on the globe was represented among the delegates in an international gathering of this nature. It met at The Hague during the summer of 1907. [Illustration: About one hundred delegates.] First session of the second Peace Conference, The Hague, Holland. Delegates from the United States were instructed to favor obligatory arbitration; the establishment of a permanent court of arbitration; the prohibition of force in the collection of contract debts; immunity from seizure of private property at sea; a clearer definition of the rights of neutrals, and the limitation of armaments. While belief was reasserted by the conference that there should be the obligatory arbitration of all questions relating to treaties and international problems of a legal nature, the principle was not adopted, although thirty-two nations of the forty-five represented favored it.