At this Congress it was determined to found a central bureau at Bern. The plan for this was suggested by Frédéric Bajer, and he and Hodgson Pratt made the proposal. Although attacked in certain quarters—is not every positive new thing always attacked?—the motion was carried, and Élie Ducommun, the Swiss delegate, was commissioned to take charge of the preliminary arrangements. The privilege of starting the first fund in the treasury of the Bern bureau was mine by virtue of the circumstance that the proprietor of the Roman daily _Fanfulla_, the Marquis Alfieri, asked my authorization to publish an Italian translation of my novel _Die Waffen nieder_ in the feuilleton of his paper, to which I agreed on condition that the honorarium—fifteen hundred francs—should be paid over to the treasury of the Bern bureau when it should be founded. In order to give a picture of those days and of the impression that they made on my mind at that time, I insert here what I wrote about them in the first number of my monthly, _Die Waffen nieder_, in January, 1892: _Echoes of the Peace Congress_ So, then, the beautiful days at Rome and Naples have now rushed past us like the rest!... But this does not mean that all that filled those days has vanished—that is to say, that the words are stilled, the thoughts dispelled, the pictures obliterated.... We know that every slight motion of the hand, by disturbing the surrounding air, operates to immeasurable distances, and in the same way we know also how through unreckonable time the movement of spirits sets the surrounding and succeeding world of spirit in vibration. “Never-to-be-forgotten” is the word ordinarily employed for days so richly filled. But it is not the correct word, for ultimately everything is forgotten; even should all those who shared the experience preserve to the end of life their recollections of what they experienced, yet there comes the time in which they themselves are forgotten, in which their ashes are scattered to the winds, their archives buried in ruins. So we will not call the contents of these days of the Congress never-to-be-forgotten, but rather ineradicable. And be it said that this event cannot be compared with a slight motion. The echo which the Congress and Conference this time awakened in the public could hardly have been wished louder. When it is realized how the Peace Congresses of 1889 and 1890 passed almost unnoticed, and what general attention was attracted to the one this year, it is fair to hope that in like progression one of the next will become an event that stirs the world. And to bring this to pass would take nothing more than either an avalanche-like spread of the announced will of the nations for peace, or the resolve of the governments themselves to come together in a High Council of Peace to plan the bases of arbitration treaties.