Nevertheless you make a mistake to cry “Away with Weapons,” because you yourself make use of them, and because yours—the charm of your style and the grandeur of your ideas—carry and will carry much farther than the Lébels, the Nordenfelts, the De Banges, and all the other implements of hell.[21] A. Nobel In a Reichsrat debate on the military budget (April 18, 1891) Minister Dunajewski, of the Department of Finance, spoke the following words: “There has recently appeared a book called _Die Waffen nieder_. I can only advise the gentlemen to devote a few hours to the reading of this novel; any one who then still has a predilection for war I can only pity.” Of course opponents were not lacking. Anonymous letters of ridicule and of abuse; withering criticisms—“What the good old lady tells about her misfortunes is indeed very sad; but the conclusions drawn from them can elicit from the serious politician only a smile”; “emotional silliness”; “obtrusive, inartistic didacticism”; “Brummagem that totally fails of its purpose”; “the authoress ought to return to her short stories, in which she has shown a quite clever talent”; etc. Even one of the great in the realm of literature, Felix Dahn, sent out an epigram which went the rounds of the press, but which—the poet himself will concede this—cannot boast of much poetic beauty: _An die weiblichen und männlichen Waffenscheuen_ Die Waffen hoch! Das Schwert ist Mannes eigen, Wo Männer fechten, hat das Weib zu schweigen, Doch freilich, Männer gibt’s in diesen Tagen, Die sollten lieber Unterröcke tragen.[22] Everything in this world is in reciprocity. What comes as a result is in turn the cause of new results. So here. I had written the book with the design of rendering, in my own way, a service to the peace movement, of whose incipient organization I had learned; and the relationships and experiences that grew out of the book have swept me more and more into the movement, so that at last I was compelled to go into it not only, as I had at first intended, with my pen, but with my whole being.