LOCARNO

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 79, 3 April 1926, Page 20

LOCARNO

&IEETING PLACE OF THE WOELD'S PEACEMAKERS.

d Some years befor^ the Great War, Mr. H. G. "Wells published "The i^World Set Free," in which he portrayled the horrors of a future war, in jwhich chemistry, prostituted to the jflevil's service, should play its deadly ipart, aiid poisonous gases decimate the 'civilian population, and lay waste the %reat cities of Europe. He concludes 3his visions of death and destruction Vitb. a peace conference where victor md vanquished come together to end .(war for over in the idyllic swinery of 'jthe. "mountains above Brissago." Brissago is but half an hour's run iby motor from Locarno, where the of the world were turned recently on the representatives of tho Great 'Powers, met together to take the most momentous step that has been taken 'since the war in the direction of world v.peace, writes Maude M. Holbach, in ijthc "Daily Chronicle." Perhaps the of-places may explain why Arcadian Locarno'rather than Lugano, jion the main highway to Italy, or cosjmopolitan Lucerne was selected for the The district around -Locarno >las always attracted the world's visionaries. Probably more people are thinking peace there in proportion to :,!t'ne population than anywhere else in Europe. Many apostles of the simple life have made their homes on the sunny shores ■'of this Swiss end of Lago Maggiore. They have come from many lands. Here on Swiss territory they were able to meet and talk'of peace when the iflames of war were still devouring Eutope. Here Baron, Alfred Wrangel, tonce head of,the Naval Academy of St. .Petersburg, friend of two' Tsars, distinguished son of the Arctic explorer who gave his name to Wrangel Island, jdrewup in 1914 a plan for the abolition of war almost identical with the I later celebrated Fourteen Points. Not far away hia friend Enrico Bignami, sickened of war under Garibaldi, worked ardently in the peace cause. "There is never one lost good," the poet; tells us, and so I think these u voic'es, now silent in the grave, echo in the mountains around the little Italian town. Just now Locarno is clad in its autjamn glory, its gardens "by the lake j shore, where oranges and lemons ripen in the sun, are still full of roses—the I purple grapes hang overhead as you '■ .walk' beneath the pergolas. Luscious figa invite yon-to a banquet, chjstnuts j Ke. thick beneath your feet as you wander through the autumn woods. Here the "kindly fruits of the earth" are to be had for tha asking. Could there be a place more fitting to sign a 2>eace pact than this?