impassioned humanitarian, Leblanc, the French ambassador at

Washington, the chief Powers 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 thisconfusion 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 intouch with that gigantic childishness which

was thecharacteristic of the American imagination. For the

Americans also were among the simple peoples by whom the world

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