transactions, personages, and social functions. All these experiences, impressions, letters, and memoranda may sometime come into use for supplementing the reminiscences (so far as they bear upon the historic development of the peace movement) which are here brought to a conclusion; and, should I not myself arrange for their publication, they will be found among my possessions after I am gone. What the immediate future will produce in this domain will assuredly surpass in significance the modest and hidden beginnings. Though the contemporary world is quite unconscious of the fact, the movement has spread far beyond the circle of the Unions, of the resolutions, and of the personal activities of single individuals; it has grown into a struggle which involves the very conception of life and all natural laws. It has passed from the hands of the so-called “Apostles” into the hands of the powerful and into the minds of the awaking democracy; within it work a hundredfold various powers, unconscious that they are thus working. It is a process which is being accomplished by the forces of nature, a slowly growing new organization of the world. The next stage is to be something quite concrete, perfectly attainable, absolved from all theoretical and all ethical universality,—the formation of an alliance of European states. Whatever the old system may accomplish by its endeavors, however insanely high the supplies of the opposing instruments of destruction may be heaped up, whatever horrors may break out in isolated places in the way of warlike reactions, I have no fear of being discredited in histories written in the future when I here register the prediction, Universal peace is on the way. And even if to-day many look askance at these prophecies, and turn from the whole cause,—indifferent, yawning, shrugging their shoulders, as if it concerned something impractical, unessential, fanciful,—yet very speedily, if once that which is in preparation, as yet silent and unobserved, comes into sight, there will be awakened the general realization that this cause demands conscious coöperation, that it includes the mightiest task of onward-marching human society,—in a word, that it is “the one important thing.” July, 1908 SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER 1904 THREE WEEKS IN AMERICA