The romance of one era is the reality of the next. The Arbitration Question has taken root, and will grow and spread. They show a cedar in the gardens at Paris--a cedar of hugest girth and widest shape--that, some century ago, was brought from Lebanon in the cap of a traveller. The olive twig, planted by Mr. Cobden in Westminster, will flourish despite the blighting wit of mess-rooms, and rise and spread into a tree that shall offer shade and security to all nations. In a similar vein is the welcome extended to the Peace Congress in Paris:-- THE PARLIAMENT OF PEACE IN PARIS Anyway, the cause of peace has been reverently preached, and reverently listened to, in the warlike city of Paris. Within a walk of the tomb of the great peace-breaker--who turned kingdoms into graves, and whose miserable purple was dyed in the heart's blood of human freedom--even there peace has been worshipped. Napoleon in his violet robe--beset with golden bees--the bees that, as in the lion of the olden day, swarmed in carcases--Napoleon, with his Pope-blessed crown clipping his homicidal brain, is, after all, a portentous, glistering evil--contrasted with our Quaker friend [Joseph Sturge], who, risen in the Hall of St. Cecilia, condemns aggressive war as an abomination, a nuisance that it behoves man, in this season of his soul's progress, with all his heart and all his mind, to denounce and renounce as un-Christian, vile, and brutifying. The drab against the purple; and, in our small thoughts, the drab, so preaching, carries it. So, again, _Punch_ breaks a lance in defence of the Peace Congress in the year 1850 at Frankfort. What if it were inspired by visionary aims? All great reformers, idealists and benefactors--Harvey, Jenner, Stephenson--had been ridiculed by unthinking and unimaginative critics:-- TO THE LAUGHERS The Peace Congress is a capital joke. It's so obvious a subject for fun that we haven't thought it worth while to waste a laugh on it. All manner of pens have been poking the public in the ribs about it--paper pellets of all colours and weights have been slung at it--arrows from all quivers have been emptied on its vulnerable sides. "Preach Peace to the World!" The poor noodles! "Inculcate the supremacy of right over might!" Ineffable milk-and-water spoonies! "Hold out to nations brotherhood for warfare, the award of justice instead of the bayonet!" The white-faced, lily-livered prigs! "Why, it's the merest Utopianism," says the _Economist_.