antly, but it was
a bit too shocking.

"The weak point of the business was, as Dundonald himself declared, that
it was so simple--as everybody knows now--that its first use would tell
the secret and put it in the hands of other nations. Therefore the
committee recommended that this incipient destruction should be stowed
away and kept secret, so that no power more unscrupulous than England
should get it and use it for the annihilation of England and the
conquest of the world. Also the committee persuaded the Earl before he
went on his South American adventure to swear formally that he would
never disclose his device except in the service of England. He kept that
oath.

"Well, the formula for this affair was, of course, in pigeonholes or
vaults in the British Admiralty ever since the committee in 1811 had
examined and refused it. But there was also, unknown to the public,
another copy. The Earl was with my great-grandfather, his kinsman and
lifelong friend, shortly before his death, and he gave this copy to him
with certain conditions. The old chap had an ungovernable temper,
quarreled right and left, don't you know, his life long, and at this
time and until he died he was not on speaking terms with his son Thomas,
who succeeded him as Earl, or indeed with any of the three other sons.
Which accounts for his trusting to my great-grandfather the future of
his invention. I found a quaint note with the papers. He said in effect
that he had come to believe with the committee that it was quite too
shocking for decent folk. Yet, he suggested, the time might come when
England was in straits and only a sweeping blow could serve her. If that
time should come it would be a joy to him in heaven or in hell--he
said--to think that a man of his name had used the work of his brains to
save England.

"Therefore, the Earl asked my grandfather to guard this gigantic secret
and to see to it that one man in each generation of Cochranes should
know it and have it at hand for use in an emergency. My grandfather came
into the papers when he came of age, and after him my father; I was due
to read them when I should be twenty-one. I was only twenty in 1917. But
the papers were mine, and from the moment it flashed to me what
Kitchener meant I didn't hesitate. It was this enormous power which was
placed suddenly in the hands of a lad of twenty. The Sirdar placed it
there.

"I went over the business in an hour--it was simple, like most big
thin