There are more important transactions in progress at this moment in Europe than the Seventh Peace Congress, which has just met in the Grand Hall of the Municipal Palace in Budapest. None are more odd, or, in a way, better worth looking at. The good men who have met on the initiative of a most excellent lady, the Baroness Bertha von Suttner, author of “Down with Arms,” and creator of the Peace Congress, represent the fine flower of all that vaguely well-meaning, emotional, and unpractical class of persons which is to be found in most countries, and nowhere in finer feather than among ourselves. To see that there is something wrong in the world, and to propose a remedy which, on inquiry, turns out to be a radical change in human nature, is the same thing with them. They are active in many fields, or, to speak with more accuracy, they talk at large on many subjects; but they are nowhere seen in more complete beauty than when in congress assembled for the purpose of speaking of peace.... Carlyle wanted to know the meaning of the moralist who, in the conflict between Gods and Giants, put out his hand armed “with a pair of tweezers.” At this moment, when it is really not too much to say that all Europe is “a town of war, the people’s hearts yet wild, brimful of fear,” the good Baroness Bertha and like-minded persons come forward at Budapest with their pair of tweezers.... The value of the Baroness von Suttner’s picnic becomes fully conspicuous when we turn, etc., etc. I sent Alfred Nobel a careful account of the events at Budapest, and corresponded also with Egidy about them. I worked steadily on my book, _Schach der Qual_, an imaginative story. A chapter in it is called _Frohbotschaft_ (“Good Tidings”). It describes an “international conference for securing peace.” In his opening address the chairman speaks these words: This meeting is called together at the initiative of one of the most powerful sovereigns of Europe, and after the assent to its principal object has been obtained from all the other governments; and almost all countries, great and small, with very few exceptions, have declared their agreement and are here represented. The book was begun in 1895 and was published by Pierson at the beginning of 1897, so that the words here cited cannot be a reminiscence of the Hague Peace Conference, which was first summoned in 1898 by “one of the most powerful sovereigns of Europe”; but they are a prophetic announcement of it. This was a coincidence rare enough to make it worthy of remark. Other incidents that interested me during the year 1896 I find jotted down in my diary: