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though not of disarmament, which he thought a foolish demand for the present. He urged establishment of a tribunal and agreement among nations for a one-year period of compulsory truce in any dispute. He turned up in person, though incognito, at a Peace Congress in Berne in 1892 and told Bertha von Suttner that if she could “inform me, convince me, I will do something great for the cause.” The spark of friendship between them had been kept alive in correspondence and an occasional visit over the years and he now wrote her that a new era of violence seemed to be working itself up; “one hears in the distance its hollow rumble already.” Two months later he wrote again, “I should like to dispose of my fortune to found a prize to be awarded every five years,” to the person who had contributed most effectively to the peace of Europe. He thought it should terminate after six awards, “for if in thirty years society cannot be reformed we shall inevitably lapse into barbarism.” Nobel brooded over the plan, embodied it in a will drawn in 1895 which allowed man a little longer deadline, and died in the following year.

The cause of arbitration almost scored a triumph in January, 1897, when Britain and the United States signed a treaty, negotiated by Secretary Olney and the British Ambassador, Sir Julian Pauncefote, for the settlement of all except territorial disputes, the memory of Venezuela being still warm. Resenting invasion of its control of foreign affairs, the Senate refused to ratify it by three votes. The defeat seemed a calamity, in Olney’s words, “not merely of national but of world wide proportions.” It shook the general belief in man’s moral progress.

In this belief, fostered in the last ten or fifteen years by signs on every hand of society’s improvement, the peace movement had its origins. The marvelous strides of science had brought the human race to a stage of material welfare ready to prove the faith of the Nineteenth Century that the better off man became the less aggressive he would be. Society now had running water and lighted streets, sanitation, preserved and refrigerated food, sewing machines, washing machines, typewriters, lawn-mowers, the phonograph, telegraph and telephone and lately, beginning in the nineties, the extraordinary gift of individual powered mobility in the horseless carriage. It seemed impossible that so much physical benefit should not have worked a spiritual change, that the new century should not begin a new era in human behavior; that man, in short, had not become too civilized for war. Science made all phenomena seem subject to certitudes and laws, and if man’s physical world could be understood and controlled, why not his social relations also? “Social conditions are destined to become different,” Baroness von Suttner wrote with conviction. The younger generation agreed. “We were sincerely persuaded in 1898 that the era of wars was over,” wrote Julien Benda, a French intellectual who was thirty-one in that year. “For fifteen years from 1890 to 1905 men of my generation really believed in world peace.”

Fear as well as faith impelled the peace movement, fear of the unchained energy of the machine age. The great surge in mechanical energy, the amazing new techniques and tools and new inventions following one upon the other, the fantastic capabilities of electricity, created an uneasy sense that man had gathered into his hands more power than he could control; power that could escape, run wild and destroy him unless put under limits. In 1820 the world disposed of 778 metric tons of mechanical energy (expressed in the coal equivalent of mineral fuels and water power) compared to 15,000,000 metric tons in 1898. Productivity per man had increased in proportion. Countries were swelling in size and strength. The death rate declined markedly, owing to developments in sanitation and medicine, with the result that since 1870 the population of Europe had increased by 100,000,000, as much as its whole population in 1650. In the same period Great Britain had acquired 4,700,000 square miles of territory,