January 9 Monday – At the Hotel Krantz in Vienna, Austria, Sam wrote a short note and a letter to William T. Stead, editor of the Review of Reviews, London:

“The Czar is ready to disarm. I am ready to disarm. Collect the others; it should not be much of a task now” [MTP: Paine’s 1917 Mark Twain’s Letters, p.291; MTB 1072].

Note: On August 24,1898, Count Mouravieff, by order of Czar Nicholas II, handed a copy of a note to the representative of every Power accredited to the Court of St. Petersburg, calling for the first Peace Conference at the Hague, which met from May 18 to July 29. The note began: “A universal peace, and a reduction of the present intolerable burdens imposed on all nations by the excessive armaments of to-day, is the ideal towards which every government should strive.” Note the similarly worded statement in the Jan. 14 article from London, suggesting this was written for Stead’s new newspaper, War Against War.

Sam’s letter to Stead began:

Peace by compulsion. That seems a better idea than the other. Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done. Can’t we reduce the armaments little by little—on a pro rata basis—by concert of the powers? Can’t we get four great powers to agree to reduce their strength 10 per cent a year and thrash the others into doing likewise? For, of course, we cannot expect all of the powers to be in their right minds at one time. It has been tried. We are not going to try to get all of them to go into the scheme peaceably, are we? In that case I must withdraw my influence; because, for business reasons, I must preserve the outward signs of sanity [MTP].

The peace treaty with Spain was ratified by the U.S. Congress; it would be signed by President McKinley on Feb. 10.