I pray for peace, and all that may promote it, and if there be a power on earth which can right the wrongs for which nations go to war, I pray that it may be made manifest, but when I think I fear. How supreme an international court must it have been to be able to induce the Southerners to liberate their slaves or to convince them that the “mudsills” and “greasy mechanics” and “horned Yankees” were a people entitled to sufficient respect to be treated on fair international ground! And how much legislation would it have taken to convince the world what a worthless bubble of assumption was France, so utterly unworthy the leadership she assumed, and to have laid her in all respects so open before the world that it should with one voice repudiate her leadership and refuse to follow her as heretofore in frivolity, immorality, folly, fashion, vice, and crime! She seems to me to have been only one great balloon, and now that the bayonets and bombs have pierced it full of holes it sends out tens of thousands of little balloons in its collapse. It is bad for France, but I am not certain but the lesson will be beneficial to the rest of the world. I don’t know if we may always trust councils--we had one at Rome not half a year ago that voted a dogma which turned backward the progress of enlightened thought two centuries, and how great a power of legislation would have been required to overthrow that decision! But I suspect the fear of Victor Emmanuel’s bayonets have seriously interfered with it. Oh, I don’t know; it is such a mystery, and mankind the greatest mystery of all! I shall never get it right in this world, whatever may happen in the one that sets this right. But how prosy I am--and it all comes of that five hours’ sleep. You know Beecher says, “If the preacher doesn’t sleep, his hearers will.” I hope you reserved the reading of this till you were ready for your nap. Soon after the fall of Paris, Miss Barton determined to make her way thither, but before leaving Strassburg she placed before the authorities of that city her views of the kind of organization which should be permanently established there for the relief of those who were suffering by reason of the war. That letter shows how thoroughly she understood the problem of administering relief without pauperizing the beneficiaries: MONSIEUR BERGMANN Membre du Comité de Secours Strasbourgeois MONSIEUR: