what has become of thee? There is no longer a common temple for
civilized states. Our house is divided against itself and is falling
asunder. Peace reigns everywhere save on the banks of the Vaal, but it
is an armed peace, an odious peace, a poisoned peace which is eating us
up and from which we are all dying."[5] Such hysterical outbursts in
France were not taken seriously by the Government, and the feeling which
inspired them was possibly more largely due to historic hatred of
England than to the inherent justice of the Boer cause.

[Footnote 5: London Times, April 2, 1900, p. 5, col. 5.]

The Ninth Peace Conference, which was in session at Paris in the fall of
1900, without expressly assuming the right of interfering in the affairs
of a friendly nation further than to "emphatically affirm the
unchangeable principles of international justice," adopted a resolution
declaring that the responsibility for the war devastating South Africa
fell upon that one of the two parties who repeatedly refused
arbitration, that is, it was explained, upon the British Government;
that the British Government, in ignoring the principles of right and
justice, in refusing arbitration and in using menaces only too likely to
bring about war in a dispute which might have been settled by judicial
methods, had committed an outrage against the rights of nations
calculated to retard the pacific evolution of humanity; that the
Governments represented at the Hague had taken no public measures to
ensure respect for the resolutions which should have been regarded by
them as an engagement of honor; that an appeal to public opinion on the
subject of the Transvaal was advocated and sympathy and admiration were
expressed for the English members of the conference.[6]

[Footnote 6: London Times, Oct. 3, 1900, p. 3, col. 3.]