By way of introduction the article told of the approaching congress in Rome, the assured participation of the Austrian parliamentarians, and the need of forming also a private association whose delegates should take part in the congress at Rome. Then it went on: This is the way affairs stand: Armies millions strong—divided into two camps clashing their arms—are awaiting only a signal to spring at each other; but in the mutual trembling dread at the immeasurable horror of the threatening outbreak may be found some security for its delay. But postponement is not suppression. The so-called “blessings” of peace which the system of armed dread endeavors to maintain are guaranteed to us only from year to year, are always represented only as lasting, “it is to be hoped,” for a while yet. Of the abolition of war, of a total suppression of the principle of force, the powers that are leagued in an armed fraternity for “the maintenance of peace” will not hear a word. To them war is sacred, ineradicable, and men must not dream of doing away with it; but it is also, in view of the dimensions which a coming conflagration will develop into, dreadful to them, inexcusable before their own consciences, so it must not be begun. But what an unnatural thing that is which must not stop nor begin, not be denied nor affirmed! An eternal preparation for that which is to be avoided by the preparation, at the same time an avoidance of that which by the avoidance is prepared! This monstrous contradiction is thus explained: that creation of historical antiquity which they are still trying to preserve—“merry” war that shifts jurisdictions, bestows power, and claims only a fraction of the population—has in the course of time, through the development of civilization, become a moral and physical impossibility. Morally impossible because men have lost something of their savagery and disregard of life; physically impossible because the accessions to our technology of destruction during the past twenty years would make of the next campaign a thing that would be something quite new and different, no longer to be designated by the name of war. _If one should prepare a bath for long hours, heat the water, heat it until it boiled and ran over, then could what happened to any one who should at last get into the tub, or rather fall in, still be called a “bath”?_ A few years more of such “maintenance” of peace, of such inventions of machines for murder,—electric mines, ekrasit-loaded aërial torpedoes,—and on the day when war is declared all the Dual, Triple, and Quadruple alliances will be blown to shivers.