Life & Wisdom Quote by Fredrik Bajer

Bajer’s sentence is doing the quiet, procedural work that makes idealism legible to governments. On the surface, it’s an almost bloodless recommendation about where an “interparliamentary conference” should focus its energy. Underneath, it’s a strategy memo for turning moral pressure into state action at the turn of the 20th century, when “peace” was becoming an institution rather than a sermon.

The triple phrasing - “the next Hague Conference, the diplomatic conference, the conference of governments” - is not clumsy repetition so much as a deliberate narrowing of the target. Bajer is insisting that peace advocates stop talking mainly to themselves and aim at the venue that actually counts: the place where cabinets, not publics, decide rules, arbitration mechanisms, and the permissible uses of force. He is also translating across power centers. Parliamentarians can generate legitimacy and publicity, but the Hague process is where sovereignty gets formalized into treaties. That’s the hinge he wants to pry open.

The subtext is pragmatic and slightly admonitory: if the interparliamentary movement disperses into general humanitarian rhetoric, it risks becoming a moral salon. “Preparation” is the key word - he’s urging coordination, drafting, coalition-building, and agenda-setting ahead of the official meeting, because once governments convene, the script hardens and smaller actors get relegated to spectators.

Context matters: the Hague Peace Conferences (1899, 1907) were early attempts to codify international dispute resolution. Bajer, a writer but also a leading peace activist in that era, is staking a claim for civil society’s indirect power - not to replace diplomacy, but to pre-load it.