A Rainbow of Hope.

LONDON, Dec. 1, 1900. The old Century is nearing its end. Its sun is setting in blood. But in the midst of the lurid smoke-clouds of war there may be discerned dimly visible amid the gloom the rainbow of hope. That which all the preaching of all the apostles of peace could not achieve has been accomplished by the heroic sacrifices which the Boers have made and are making in the cause of liberty and independence. Thanks to them them "L'Arbitrage, L'Arbitrage". has become the popular rallying cry of the Continental peoples. When the Hague Conference closed, its most earnest members declared that they would have laboured in vain and spent their strength for nought and in vain unless something was done to bring home to the knowledge of the nations the significance and the importance of the Arbitration Convention. They contemplated but the propagandism of the platform, the pulpit and the press, supplemented mayhap by the pictures of the magic lantern and the kinematograph. But the Unseen, whom our forefathers described as God, the Ruler and Governor of the World, and whom pagans ancient and modern would describe as the Fates or the Destinies, willed otherwise. For their ways are not as our ways, and often when they cause our little plans to miscarry it is because they have their own method of arriving at the goal. Scheming to cross the sea in a row-boat, we despair when our fragile craft founders in the surge. But looking up we see that the wave which seemed so fatal to our hopes was but the swell made by the screw of the huge steamship sent to carry us more swiftly to Our destination.

"He Maketh the Wrath of Man

The war in South Africa, that concentrated sum of all the stupidities, to Praise Him." upset the programme for the propaganda of peace. It seemed fatal to the hope of popularising arbitration. To the unthinking the war seemed to brand the Conference as a failure, and to hopelessly prejudice any attempt to explain to the masses the hope for the future that lay wrapped up in the Convention of Arbitration. But this war has not only furnished mankind with the most conspicuous and irresistible of object lessons as to the ruinous cost, the excessive prolongation and practical uselessness of modern war,

but it has quite unexpectedly created the most eloquent and the best equipped propagandists of arbitration, and launched them upon their apostolate in Europe at the psychological moment, under circumstances of all others most calculated to open every ear to their words. Of all the unexpected devices of the Destinies, who could have imagined that in the forge of the South African war they were fashioning an instrument by which they intended to popularise arbitration throughout Europe? But President Kruger's mission reveals the result. The heroic valour and the unparalleled sacrifices of the farmers of the veldt have aroused the enthusiasm and commanded the admiration of the world. The central figure in that great tragedy, whose episodes recall even to Englishmen the glories of Thermopyla and of Sempach, is the cynosure of every eye. To him every ear is turned. Admiration, sympathy, the passionate indignation which is roused in the heart of man at the spectacle of a gigantic Ahab endeavouring to slay a friendless Naboth in order to seize his vineyard, secure for President Kruger an eager and respectful audience throughout the Continent. The roar of the Long Toms and the rattle of the Mauser emphasise his words. Could the wildest imagination in its moods of optimism have conceived any apostle better qualified to interest the masses of the Continent in the work of the Hague Conference?

Mission.

As the Colosseum became the gigantic President Kruger's advertising board of the Christian religion, so this war in South Africa is the screen upon which is thrown, in blood-red light, a world-wide advertisement of the Hague Convention. In time of peace public attention needs to be flogged with scorpions to rouse it to pay even the most languid attention to arbitration and the rules of war. But with Hell let loose, and the flames of Tophet blazing skyward from every Boer farmstead fired by the British torch, there is no difficulty in obtaining a hearing for President Kruger when, in a voice that reverberates throughout a continent, he declares that in the provisions of the Hague Convention lies the only hope for international action in the cause of peace. A thousand eloquent sermons, a thousand thrilling orations, a million effective pamphlets would have done little to turn the eyes of mankind to this new hope of the world compared