“Do not for a moment imagine that this is a bad thing. Rudyard Kipling wrote me at the beginning of the peace crusade, ‘War will last until some inventive genius furnishes a machine which will annihilate fifty per cent of the combatants as soon as they face one another.’ Therefore I think that the Conference, while it has decisively rejected a whole series of proposals—even those that came from the Tsar—in the line of prohibiting the improvement of cannon and other weapons, has been acting in behalf of peace and not of war.” “I think so too,” I reply; “only that is not their reason for doing as they have. The military men who have voted the measure down have done so for the special purpose of promoting militarism.” To-day the Congress is considering a weighty point, Section 1 of Muravieff’s second circular: An understanding not to increase for a fixed period the present effective of the armed military and naval forces, and, at the same time, not to increase the budgets pertaining thereto. This is the question that is of greatest importance for the champions of peace, for it touches the evil of armed peace. This condition—according to Türr, _la peur armée_—has this basis: the presupposition on which the relations of nations are established is that the neighbor has the morals of a bandit and the conscience of a pirate! Bad news from London,—the House of Commons has granted four million pounds for purposes of war. Under date of June 27 I confided to my diary the text of the whole “armament” debate, which took place on the twenty-third and twenty-sixth of the month. Here I will introduce only the most notable passages. This is sufficient to bring out the attitude of the various governments toward this question. FIRST SESSION, JUNE 23. HERR BEERNAERT, CHAIRMAN We have now reached the serious problem which the Russian government placed first of all, so worded that it instantly aroused the attention of the world. This time it is not the nations, but a mighty monarch, who believes that the enormous burdens that are the result of the armed peace in which Europe has been existing since 1871 are calculated “to paralyze public welfare at its sources, and that their constant increase involves an oppressive load which the nations will have ever greater and greater difficulty in enduring.” Count Muravieff’s circular has stated the problem in a little more condensed form as follows: “What are the means by which a limit might be set to the increase of armaments? Could the nations pledge themselves against an increase or even in favor of a reduction?” I hope that our honored president, his Excellency von Staal, who has asked for the floor, will give us an explicit explanation of these points. Herr von Staal said: