ers of the world were to meet in a last desperate conference to 'save
humanity.'

Leblanc was one of those ingenuous men whose lot would have been
insignificant in any period of security, but who have been caught up
to an immortal role in history by the sudden simplification of
human affairs through some tragical crisis, to the measure of their
simplicity. Such a man was Abraham Lincoln, and such was Garibaldi.
And Leblanc, with his transparent childish innocence, his entire
self-forgetfulness, came into this confusion of distrust and intricate
disaster with an invincible appeal for the manifest sanities of the
situation. His voice, when he spoke, was 'full of remonstrance.' He was
a little bald, spectacled man, inspired by that intellectual idealism
which has been one of the peculiar gifts of France to humanity. He was
possessed of one clear persuasion, that war must end, and that the only
way to end war was to have but one government for mankind. He brushed
aside all other considerations. At the very outbreak of the war, so soon
as the two capitals of the belligerents had been wrecked, he went to the
president in the White House with this proposal. He made it as if it was
a matter of course. He was fortunate to be in Washington and in touch
with that gigantic childishness which was the characteristic of the
American imagination. For the Americans also were among the simple
peoples by whom the world was saved. He won over the American president
and the American government to his general ideas; at any rate they
supported him sufficiently to give him a standing with the more
sceptical European governments, and with this backing he set to work--it
seemed the most fantastic of enterprises--to bring together all the
rulers of the world and unify them. He wrote innumerable letters, he
sent messages, he went desperate journeys, he enlisted whatever support
he could find; no one was too humble for an ally or too obstinate
for his advances; through the terrible autumn of the last wars this
persistent little visionary in spectacles must have seemed rather like a
hopeful canary twittering during a thunderstorm. And no accumulation of
disasters daunted his conviction that they could be ended.

For the whole world was flaring then into a monstrous phase of
destruction. Power after Power about the armed globe sought to
anticipate attack by aggression. They went to war in a delirium of
panic, in order to use their bombs first. China