of Etna.  Even though the shattered official governments now clamoured for peace, bands of irreconcilables and invincible patriots, usurpers, adventurers, and political desperadoes, were everywhere in possession of the simple apparatus for the disengagement of atomic energy and the initiation of new centres of destruction.  The stuff exercised an irresistible fascination upon a certain type of mind.  Why should any one give in while he can still destroy his enemies?  Surrender?  While there is still a chance of blowing them to dust?  The power of destruction which had once been the ultimate privilege of government was now the only power left in the world—­and it was everywhere.  There were few thoughtful men during that phase of blazing waste who did not pass through such moods of despair as Barnet describes, and declare with him:  ‘This is the end....’

And all the while Leblanc was going to and fro with glittering glasses and an inexhaustible persuasiveness, urging the manifest reasonableness of his view upon ears that ceased presently to be inattentive.  Never at any time did he betray a doubt that all this chaotic conflict would end.  No nurse during a nursery uproar was ever so certain of the inevitable ultimate peace.  From being treated as an amiable dreamer he came by insensible degrees to be regarded as an extravagant possibility.  Then he began to seem even practicable.  The people who listened to him in 1958 with a smiling impatience, were eager before 1959 was four months old to know just exactly what he thought might be done.  He answered with the patience of a philosopher and the lucidity of a Frenchman.  He began to receive responses of a more and more hopeful type.  He came across the Atlantic to Italy, and there he gathered in the promises for this congress.  He chose those high meadows above Brissago for the reasons we have stated.  ‘We must get away,’ he said, ‘from old associations.’  He set to work requisitioning material for his conference with an assurance that was justified by the replies.  With a slight incredulity the conference which was to begin a new order in the world, gathered itself together.  Leblanc summoned it without arrogance, he controlled it by virtue of an infinite humility.  Men appeared upon those upland slopes with the apparatus for wireless telegraphy; others followed with tents and provisions; a little cable was flung down to a convenient point upon the Locarno road below.  Leblanc arrived, sedulously directing every detail that would affect the tone of the assembly.  He might have been a courier in advance rather than the originator of the gathering.  And then there arrived, some by the cable, most by aeroplane, a few in other fashions, the men who had been called together to confer upon the state of the world.  It was to be a conference without a name.  Nine monarchs, the presidents of four republics, a number of ministers and ambassadors, powerful journalists, and such-like prominent and influential men, took part in it.  There were even scientific men; and that world-famous old man, Holsten, came with the others to contribute his amateur statecraft to the desperate problem of the age.  Only Leblanc would have dared so to summon figure heads and powers and intelligence, or have had the courage to hope for their agreement....