Only there stands in the articles the fatal clause, “If circumstances permit.” Here is clearly seen the result of compromise, which is generally contained in the text of resolutions of such committees, composed of advocates and opponents of any cause. Only under the condition of a rider which robs the main article of its universal validity will those of the other party give up their opposition. The back door is saved, and that is the main thing with them. Arrival of Baron Pirquet. He has been in Brussels, where the council of the Interparliamentary Union held a session in order to lay out a programme for the Conference that is to take place in August at Christiania; and he brings a letter from the Union to the colleagues that are attending the Hague Congress. Pirquet breaks the news to me that my cousin Christian Kinsky, in whose house we had spent so many pleasant hours, had died suddenly a few days before. In the evening Bloch’s second lecture. He depicts the difficulties that would attend the mobilization of the modern millionfold armies. After the first fortnight of a war of the future a tenth part of the armies—not counting the wounded—would be in the hospitals. He also cites a statement made by General Haeseler: “If the improvement of firearms continues, there will not be enough survivors to bury the dead.” This lecture, like the first, was interrupted by a recess for conversation and refreshments. We talked with Léon Bourgeois about events in Paris. There, it seems, a band of young men of title (Boni de Castellane and others) attacked the President’s hat with their canes. Bourgeois grants that this is disgusting; “but,” he adds, “it is no more dangerous than the foam on the seashore.” June 7. At yesterday’s session the deliberations of the first committee (on the laws of war, weapons, etc.) had the floor. Concerning this I make no entry in my diary. The securing and organizing of peace have nothing to do with the regulation of war, nothing at all—quite the contrary! It is desired—that is, it is desired by many—that the opposition between the two ends be abolished; they desire that the one be substituted in place of the other! They are driving in the wedge that shall split the work of peace. Imagine a congress convened for the enfranchisement of slaves; would a convention then be necessary in regard to the treatment of the negroes, concerning, for instance, the number of blows that might be meted out to them when they should show themselves lazy in the work of the sugar plantations? Or in the movement against torture as a means of securing justice, would the agreement that the oil to be dropped into the victim’s ears should be heated only to thirty degrees instead of up to the boiling point have been a stage on the way to the goal, or rather a tarrying on that other way which was to be abandoned? June 9. My Own waked me with a kiss and a warm “I thank thee!” “What for?” “That thou wert born!”