Power engenders pride. Everything is permitted to it—so it thinks—and it wishes to make manifest that it is bold enough to attempt anything. So the whole Esterhazy investigation, the Esterhazy trial, and the shameful Esterhazy apotheosis are a pure satire on every judicial proceeding, a slap in the face of august Justice,—even more, a trampling of her scales under the spur-armed heel of the soldier’s boot! The people must knuckle under,—that must be borne in upon them so that another time the desire may pass of pulling down the General Staff’s sacred ensign of error! You wanted to run up against a _res judicata_, did you? Very well, now you have two of them. And quite right; the people knuckled under. “The affair is at an end” (_Affaire liquidée_ is the heading over the leading articles in the papers); but a man got up and uttered the cry of his soul,—_J’accuse_,—one man against an army! The far-distant ages to come will praise this heroic action. Even in our family circle there were disputes about the affair. My father-in-law, the conservative-minded, ardent reader of _Das Vaterland_, would hear nothing of the proofs in favor of the exile. He also believed in the “Jewish syndicate” that was bent on buying the rehearing. And my mother-in-law had nothing good to say about Zola; she had even gone so far once as to make a great auto-da-fé of such of his books as had strayed into the house. The year 1897 closes with an event that might well arouse much anxiety among the partisans of peace. We know how it began, but we can never know how it will end; it carries war in its womb, for it is once more something undertaken under the emblem of force,—the voyage of the fighting squadron to the Yellow Sea. So then ... Port Arthur besieged by the Russians, Kiauchau by the Germans,—that is the newly created situation. High Politics, that is fifty or sixty men and a following of newspapers, see to it that there shall never be any rest, that no progress can ever be made toward the healing of internal troubles, the elevation of human society. A cruel state of things for the champions of peace! For years there have been perpetual wars and rumors of wars, even while in the governmental circles there were constant assurances of peace. Japan and China, the Venezuela controversy, Spain and Cuba, Armenian massacres, Italy and Africa, Greece and Turkey, England and India, and now this East-Asiatic expedition! And all the time constantly increasing armaments and paroxysms over fleets. No wonder that the slow, as it were subterranean, peace movement remains unobserved by the masses. LIV A STIRRING HALF YEAR Outbreak of the Spanish-American War · Article in mourning borders · Fridtjof Nansen’s lecture in Vienna · Extracts from diary · Bereavement in the family, Countess Lotti Sizzo’s death · Johann von Bloch’s book · Death of Bismarck · End of the Spanish-American War