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committee, delivered the chief address when the "first stone" was laid. The president of the conference, M. Nelidow, of Russia, performed the ceremony of laying the stone and also delivered a significant address. At one of the last plenary sessions of the conference, Baron d'Estournelles, of France, offered a resolution expressive of the desire "that each government represented at The Hague should contribute to the erection of the Peace Palace by sending, after consultation with the architect, materials of construction and ornamentation, representing the purest example of its national production, so that this Palace, an expression of universal good will and hope, may be built of the very substance of all countries." The Baron presented this resolution in a short but eloquent speech, which was greeted with great applause, and the resolution was adopted by acclamation.

V. ORGANIZED PUBLIC OPINION

a. THE CONFERENCE OF 1899

A programme of topics for discussion had been agreed upon by the governments before the conference met, and each delegation, of course, had its specific instructions from its own government. But, although a strenuous effort was made at first to keep all reports of the debates secret from the public, it was inevitable that enterprising journalists should discover what was being said and done and should publish the facts broadcast in the daily and weekly newspapers of the world; and it was equally inevitable that the great, incalculable force of the world's public opinion should beat upon the conferences and their members, and make its influence directly and indirectly felt.

The first conference, at its first session, passed a resolution declaring all meetings of the conference and its committees to be absolutely secret; and so far was this carried that a very few invited guests were admitted as spectators only on the opening and closing days, while during all the other sessions of both conference and committees all outsiders of every kind were excluded, and visitors were not even permitted to inspect the Palace. Not only were outsiders thus debarred from securing and publishing any account of the proceedings, but the conference itself made inadequate provision for recording its transactions. There was not a single stenographer among its

secretaries, and the minutes of each meeting were not verbatim reports, nor were any copies of them, nor any documents connected with the proceedings, permitted to be published. This secrecy was defended by some of the leaders of the conference on the ground that only thus could complete freedom of speech and deliberation be secured. On the other hand, the journalists denounced it as an absurd superstition, as an anachronism dating from the time when the only international conferences were gatherings of royal conspirators plotting the theft of their neighbors' lands; and they urged England's and America's example to show that only where complete publicity accompanies public action can genuine freedom of speech or responsibility exist. Acting on this belief, the journalists present at The Hague brought every possible pressure to bear upon individual delegates and procured in this way information that was meager, half true, or wholly false. One of them caricatured so unmercifully an alleged speech of Dr. Zorn, one of the German delegates, that the German government, following Bismarck's precedent at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, made a formal demand that some official account of the proceedings should be given to the press. Accordingly, at its second session, May 20, the conference decided, in the words of its president, "to take into consideration the legitimate curiosity of the public attentive to our labors," and authorized the president to communicate through the secretaries to the press a summary of the proceedings of each session. These brief summaries were largely supplemented by voluntary statements from individual delegates, most of whom came to see that secrecy was impossible and publicity desirable. Indeed, the majority of the delegates themselves—and this was true

especially of the second conference-learned of the work of the small committees only from the information secured through secret channels by two or three enterprising journalists. And the great world outside would have known but little and probably cared far less than it did for the work of the conference, if it had succeeded in hiding its light under a bushel in the way in which it at first tried to do. While the conference itself would very probably have failed in its most important work, the promotion of arbitration, had it not been fortified at a critical time by the power of public opinion.

The agencies through which this power of public opinion was organized and brought to bear upon the conferences were memorials and deputations in large numbers and of many kinds. Cablegrams, letters, addresses, even pamphlets and books, were showered upon the conference, or upon one or other of its delegations, by individuals, societies and churches. These contained sympathy, advice, exhortation, command; and a few of them outlined definite plans for an arbitration tribunal which were of great service to the committee in charge of that subject. The chief value of these multitudinous communications, however, was to convince the conference that the peoples of the civilized world hoped and demanded that the conference should accomplish something definite and fruitful for the preservation of the world's peace.

The governments behind the conference came to share this conviction, and it is related by Ambassador White that the German Chancellor, Von Hohenlohe, was largely influenced by evidences of the popular demand for an

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1 Dr. White mentions particularly the call of the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Texas for prayers throughout the State in its behalf.

arbitration court to change the German delegation's instructions in regard to it from opposition to support.

In addition to "the written word" came many "living epistles" in the form of delegates or deputations who sought to address the conference or its various delegations on a great variety of subjects. Especially prominent and persistent among these were the representatives of the world's weaker nationalities, such as the Poles, Finns, Armenians, Macedonians, and Young Turks, who appealed to the conference to aid them in realizing their aspirations towards independence or to alleviate the miseries of their daily life. The argument which they brought to the Peace Conference was that permanent peace could be secured for the world only after justice had been procured for them. But however much the delegates to the conference might sympathize with such aspirations and miseries, the conference itself rightly decided that it had no jurisdiction over such matters. Hence, these deputations, disappointed and embittered, returned to their countries, there to spread the belief that the conference was a mockery and a farce, and to proceed with increased vigor to further the gospel of revolution and violence as the only hope of their salvation.

b. THE CONFERENCE OF 1907

Baroness von Suttner, the author of "Lay down your Arms," who was present at The Hague during the sessions of both conferences, engaged in writing of them for the public press, said of the members of the second conference:

"That which impresses me most is their respectful obedience to the desires of public opinion. If they oppose a reform, it is only because they are persuaded that public opinion is indifferent to it. If public

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