I think the jingo feeling is subsiding in England. Now that the people are at last realizing what war means, there is less shouting and enthusiasm. I am told that even in the music halls this tendency is very marked. Of course patriotic songs will always command a large audience and excite natural patriotic emotions, but people are beginning to think and to ask themselves what the war is about, and whether warfare is the best way of really pacifying South Africa. I have great confidence in the ultimate good sense of my countrymen when the fever has passed away. All the same, the path of idealists like ourselves is not made more easy by what has happened. I hope Baron von Suttner is well. Kindly remember me to him and allow me to subscribe myself as Very sincerely yours Philip Stanhope I asked an expression of opinion from Count Nigra for the annual meeting of my Union. The ambassador replied with the following letter: Rome, Grand Hotel, November 29, 1899 My dear Baroness: You are quite right in seizing the occasion of the meeting of the Austrian peace society to ask a word of approbation and encouragement from those who worked for peace at the Conference at The Hague. That Conference has had to meet with two untoward accidents,—the Dreyfus affair and the conflict in the Transvaal. The first distracted public attention from our work; the other seems to contradict it. The coincidence is certainly very regrettable. But these are only passing incidents, while our work is destined to last as long as time lasts. The Conference is accused of not having produced immediate results. To tell the truth we enjoyed no illusion in this respect. We knew perfectly well that we had not been working to secure the peace of the world from one day to another. On the contrary, we had the consciousness of working for the future of humanity. Moreover, is it true that the Conference had no immediate effect? I think that the mere fact that such a Conference was convoked by a powerful monarch, like the Emperor of Russia, that it was accepted by all the powers, and that it could meet and work for months with the purpose of making wars less frequent and less cruel for the nations,—that fact alone is already a great result. It proves at least that the ideas of peace and arbitration have entered into the consciousness of governments and of peoples.