of its powerful influence in favor of it at The Hague. That will almost certainly assure its adoption.

This special Committee went further at Paris and decided to propose at The Hague that the Interparliamentary Union be reorganized so as to constitute a parliamentary official adjunct to the Hague Conference as a regular body, or a Lower House, representing the people through the parliaments as the other body will represent the governments. As this would make the scheme much more complex and difficult to bring into working order at the present time, we doubt very much if the Hague Conference can be induced to recommend it. But if the first part of the plan, which is perfectly simple and feasible, shall be adopted, the step of fate will have been taken, and that permanent and complete organization of the nations which is now demanded by so many of the larger interests of humanity will have taken another step even more momentous than that of setting up the Hague Tribunal. All the rest will follow in its time, and its time will not be far away.

The Nobel Peace Prize for 1905.

The Nobel Peace Prize for 1905 was awarded, on the 10th of December, to the Baroness Bertha von Suttner of Vienna, Austria. The ceremony took place in the new building of the Nobel Institute in Christiania, which was only recently completed and opened as the permanent headquarters of the work of the Committee of the Norwegian parliament, which has in charge the administration of the peace prize fund. The occasion was rendered the more noteworthy by the presence of the new king of Norway, Haakon, and Queen Maud, together with all the ministers of state, the members of the parliament and of the diplomatic corps.

The Baroness well deserves the recognition that has thus been given to her long-continued, self-sacrificing and eminently efficient services in the cause of peace. Though possessed of but small means, she has carried on for fifteen or sixteen years, her husband heartily cooperating with her as long as he lived, an incessant campaign through the European press, public lectures and private interviews in behalf of the noble ideas to which she has consecrated her talents and her high position. She has been a prominent figure in the Peace Congresses since 1891. She had large influence at The Hague during the Czar's Peace Conference in 1899. Her great story, "Lay Down Your Arms" (Die Waffen Nieder), has had an immense circulation, having gone through some thirty editions in German and a large number in the translations which have been made of it into foreign languages. A number of other books from her pen"Schach der Qual," "The Peace Conference at The Hague," etc. have also supported and extended the

fine humanitarian principles which lay at the foundation of her famous story.

The Baroness has been singularly fortunate in escaping criticism. Her zeal and courage in advocating the cause of peace have always been marked with good judgment and tact. Her public work has not lessened in the least her remarkable womanly reserve and delicacy of manner. Nor has her position in the nobility, which has given her unusual influence in the higher political circles of Europe, closed her way to effective labor among the common people wherever she has met and spoken to them; for she is thoroughly democratic in her conceptions and feelings, showing always the deepest sympathies with the people in their struggles and sufferings.

Her many friends in all countries are heartily glad that the Nobel Committee have seen their way this year to award her this great prize of nearly forty thousand dollars. Some of them have been surprised that the recognition has not come earlier, especially in view of the fact that it was through her influence with Mr. Nobel, in an interview at Paris some time before he died, that he was induced to devote a part of his immense fortune to the advancement of the cause of international peace.

The circumstances attending the annual bestowing of this prize bear testimony to the extraordinary progress which the peace cause has made in recent years, and the powerful hold which it now has upon the civilized world. We have alluded above to the presence of the King of Norway, the parliament, the state ministers and the foreign ministers at the ceremonies on the 10th ult. in the Nobel Institute. That in itself was highly significant. But it is still more remarkable that the civilized world takes such an extraordinary interest in the awarding of this prize. Four other Nobel prizes of the same amount are conferred at the same time each year by a Committee of the Swedish parliament, but if one may judge from the amount of space devoted to them in the press, the peace prize attracts more attention and awakens deeper interest than all the others combined. The other prizes deal with great sections of human knowledge and interest physics and chemistry, literature, history, physiology and medicine; but the peace prize has to do with the most fundamental and universal interests of humanity in all countries, and in all its ranks and classes, and this accounts largely for the wider interest which it awakens. Whoever proves to be worthy to receive this prize is, in the present condition of the nations, armed to the breaking point and weighted down by the burdens of militarism, rightly considered a benefactor of all men everywhere.

One word more. The Nobel Peace Prize Committee, now organized as the Nobel Institute, with its excellent new building constructed at a cost of $70,000, is destined to be hereafter one of the most

conspicuous and influential centres of the peace propaganda. The building contains administration rooms, committee rooms, a hall for public lectures, and fine library rooms, in which has already been placed the excellent and rapidly growing collection of books dealing with international questions.

Garrison as a Peace Man. William Lloyd Garrison, the one hundredth anniversary of whose birth was celebrated last month, was a many-sided man as a reformer. But the circumstances of the times caused him to be so fully occupied with the anti-slavery movement that he is not usually thought of in other connections. But he was as radical in his views on peace, temperance, free trade, woman's rights, Chinese exclusion, etc., as on slavery. Under other conditions he might have become a powerful leader in any one of these movements.

The root out of which his opinions on all these subjects grew was the same, namely, his feeling of the worth of human beings as such. It is doubtful if any man of any time ever had a profounder sense of the inherent value of men. He saw also with great clearness the bearings of this conception on all the social and political relations of society. A few of his own utterances reveal the depth and breadth of his thought in this regard: "My country is the world; my countrymen are all mankind.' This was the motto which he put and kept at the head of all his work. Again: "I claim to be a human rights man; and wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the sex or complexion." "I go for the people, the whole people, whatever be their bodily dimensions, temporal conditions or shades of color." He was led, therefore, inevitably by the logic of his principles to take a deep interest in every movement for the promotion of justice, human rights, human liberties and opportunities, and for the removal and destruction of every practice and system which injures and degrades men.

He very early became convinced that war and the spirit creating and controlling it constitute one of the deepest and direst evils and crimes which afflict and mar humanity. He at once took the most radical grounds in opposition to the whole system. He became a "non-resistant," entirely renouncing violence not only as a means of securing justice and right but even of defending oneself against assault. In 1833, in a declaration drawn up for the Anti-Slavery Society, he said: "Our principles forbid the doing of evil that good may come, and lead us to reject, and to entreat the oppressed to reject, the use of all carnal weapons for deliverance from bondage." Again he wrote: "We register our testimony not only against all wars, whether offensive or defensive, but all preparations for war-against every naval ship, every

arsenal, every fortification; against the militia system and a standing army; against all military chieftains and soldiers; against all monuments commemorative of victory over a fallen foe, all trophies won in battle, all celebrations in honor of military or naval exploits,

etc."

In 1838 a convention was called in Boston to consider non-resistance as a basis of peace. It was attended by one hundred and fifty persons. Garrison led in the deliberations, and drew up a long document, which the convention adopted, in which the non-resistant views were expounded in their fullest scope. The Non-Resistance Society, founded by the Convention, continued for several years, and issued a semimonthly paper, which was edited by Edmund Quincy. Garrison considered this "a still greater cause" than the anti-slavery movement.

So consistent did Garrison endeavor to be in adherence to his principles that he refused to have anything to do with whatever seemed to him to excuse or in any way uphold war-holding office, voting, occupying a seat in a legislative assembly, or on the bench. He likewise declined to coöperate with the peace societies which were not founded upon the nonresistance principle, but admitted into their membership all persons who believed war to be a dire evil and scourge, and desired to help abolish it, even though they believed it still sometimes inevitable and justifiable. In this particular he went to greater extremes than many other non-resistant peace men, like John Bright, for example, who were just as loyal to their principles as he, but who did not believe some of Garrison's methods either imperative or the wisest and most effective for accomplishing the results sought by all of them, namely, the extinction of

war.

Garrison has often been criticised for taking these extreme practical positions. But we think the criticism hardly just. Constituted as he was and feeling deeply as he did, he could scarcely have done otherwise and remained a conscientious and forceful man. Every man must do his work in his own way, according to his own genius and the insight which he is able to attain. This Garrison evidently did.

Garrison has been declared to have abandoned his peace principles when the Civil War came on. The Encyclopedia Britannica makes this assertion. But this seems to us a very superficial view, and radically untrue. It was a very trying situation in which he found himself, but he never faltered in his personal adherence to his non-resistance principles, as Whittier never did. He remained an unarmed man, disapproving of resort to violence, relying for himself solely on moral forces, in whose irresistibility he firmly believed, if men could only be brought vigorously to maintain them. When the war was actually on, he sympathized with every success of the North, because he saw in it a hope of the overthrow of the abomination of slavery.