Gracious and honored Lady:
I hope that these lines, with the assurance that I thoroughly approve
the aims of the International Peace and Arbitration Association and am
ready and willing to become a member, will reach you while you are
still in Vienna.
Although I believe with Heraclitus that battle is the father of all
things, yet I hope and wish with all my heart that the better stock of
competition for the higher blessings of civilization may displace the
savage and cruel conflict of races and the bloody warfare between
nations, which at present still, as in the Middle Ages, brings the
greatest wretchedness to the “highly civilized” nations of the present
day.
May the Peace Congress in Rome on the ninth of November be attended by
the best results!
With especially high respect, your devoted
Ernst Haeckel
XXX
UNION FOR RESISTANCE TO ANTI-SEMITISM
A. G. von Suttner, Count Hoyos, Baron Leitenberger, and Professor
Nothnagel found the Union · Article in the _Neue Freie Presse_
Before I write of the congress in Rome I want to go back a bit. In
the spring of 1891—consequently before the founding of the
Interparliamentary Group and the Peace Association in Vienna—my
husband had also brought into existence an association of which I
wish to tell.
We were still in the Caucasus when, at the beginning of the eighties, we
were informed of the Anti-Semitic movement started in Prussia, and
propagated by Court Chaplain Stöcker. This phenomenon, I need hardly
say, aroused lively disgust in us. We set forth the arguments against
this reversion to the Middle Ages in various articles written for the
Vienna papers on which we were regular collaborators, but the articles
were returned to us on the ground that in Austria there was no
Anti-Semitism, and if any of it should spread from Prussia to us the
only proper attitude toward it would be contemptuous silence. Later
events showed that this attitude was not the proper one. Wrong must be
withstood if it is recognized as such; there is no other way. In such
cases silence, though professing to express contempt, is itself
contemptible. Not only must the victims react against it, it is also for
those who are not personally concerned to antagonize a wrong wherever
they see it. Their silence is complicity, and generally springs from the
same motives as the silence of the victims,—that is, from timidity. Only
not to come into any collision, only not to subject one’s self to
annoyances,—that is the motive at bottom, even if it does outwardly bear
itself as genteel reserve.
After we came home the Anti-Semitic movement in Vienna had taken on
especially brutal forms. In the year 1891 it had even gone as far as
violence. The indignation which my husband felt boiled over.
“Something must be done!” was his decision.
And he sat down and wrote a constitution and a plan of action and an
appeal. And now what he had to do was to find some prominent men who
would go hand in hand with him. That same evening—we were just then in
Vienna—he went to look up Count Hoyos in his residence on the
Kolowratring. “The gentleman is not in,” said the servant; “he is
downstairs in the club.” My husband immediately betook himself to the
lower floor, where the clubrooms were situated, and sent for the count,
who was sitting at a whist table.
“What is it, dear Suttner, anything very urgent?”
“Yes, justice for the persecuted—”
“Out with it!”
Count Hoyos took hold of the matter enthusiastically, and proposed to
invite his whist partner, Baron Leitenberger, the well-known Liberal
manufacturer, to join the provisory committee. So he also was called
out, and a few moments later the formation of the league was a settled
thing among these three. The next day Professor Nothnagel, so highly
regarded both as a man and as a savant, came in with them; and a short
time afterwards the constituting assembly met, with these four men at
the speakers’ table. After the appeal had been printed in the papers,
several hundred, including personages prominent in Viennese society and
politics, had joined. On the day after the first meeting the _Neue Freie
Presse_ published the following article, which will give the best
explanation of the author’s ideas and purposes: