Unfortunately I did not make the acquaintance of the so-called “smart set,” the upper four hundred, whose palaces line Fifth Avenue and who are so constantly regarded as the type of the leading classes in America—though as mistakenly so regarded as a certain Boulevard society is taken for the prototype of French character. It would have been very interesting to study this “smart set.” All that I saw was the outside of their palaces, but they certainly presented to the eye no remarkable splendor. Their possessors—the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers and Morgans and Astors and others—at this season of the year were either still at their country estates or away traveling. The huge opera house, in which German, French, and Italian operas, each in the original, are performed by the leading artists of the world, was not yet opened. The Italian opera will begin with Puccini’s _Bohème_, sung by Caruso and Marcella Sembrich. Madame Schumann-Heink, who is undertaking the rôle of Kundry, is just at present the object of many social attentions and incessant interviews. The performances of _Parsifal_, regarded by Frau Cosima Wagner as desecration, are said to have been of overwhelming beauty. The Americans are importing all our treasures of refined art and old culture; for us there is only one revenge: we must absorb more and more of their acquisitions, give more attention to the life that is unfolding there, rise above envy and jealousy, above pride and prejudice,—those feelings which in an epoch of international intercourse are no longer suitable, and which in the past have stood in the way of the development of universal comity. For, after all, we are only one world; every treasure, every forward step in whatever corner of the earth, increases the wealth and the potentiality of happiness of the whole human family. The words “human family” (a family as yet far from united, still living in bitter feud) bring me back to the theme that lay at the basis of my whole transatlantic journey,—the Peace Congress. In New York, among the festivities arranged in honor of the delegates, was a great meeting organized by the Germans living there. It was held in Terrace Garden under the honorary chairmanship of Oscar S. Straus, member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, former Ambassador Dr. Andrew D. White, and the universally respected Carl Schurz. “Why so respected?” This question was once put to Dr. White by Bismarck. “Tell me, on what grounds does the old forty-eighter enjoy such universal and high regard in your country?” “For this reason,” replied the American ambassador, “because he was the man who treated the slavery question, which at that time was _the_ question, not, as was customary, from the philanthropical or the constitutional, but from the philosophical standpoint, with regard to its significance not for the negroes, but for the country.”