LOCARNO

Southland Times, Issue 19837, 7 April 1926, Page 6

LOCARNO

MEETING PLACE OF THE WORLD’S PEACEMAKERS. Some years before the Great War, Mr H. G. Wells published The World Set Free, in which he portrayed the horrors of a future war, in which chemistry, prostituted to the devil’s service, should play its deadly part, and poisonous gases decimate the civilian population, and lay waste the great cities of Europe. He concludes his visions of death and destruction with a peace conference where victor and vanquished come together to end war for ever in the idyllic scenery of the "mountains above Brissago.” Brissago is but half an hour’s run by motor from Locarno, where the eyes of the world were turned recently on the representatives of the Great Powers, met together to take the most momentous step that has been taken since the war in the direction of world peace, writes Maude M. Holbach, in the Daily Chronicle. Perhaps the psychology of places may explain why Arcadian Locarno rather than Lugano, on the main highway to Italy, or cosmopolitan Lucerne was selected for the meeting. The district around Locarno has always attracted the world’s visionaries. Probably more people are thinking peace there in proportion to the 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 flames of war were still devouring Europe. Here Baron Alfred Wrangel, once 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, drew up in 1914 a plan for the abolition of war almost identical with the later celebrated Fourteen Points. Not far away his 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 voices, now silent in the grave, echo in the mountains around the little Italian town. Just now Locarno is clad in its autumn glory, its gardens by the lake shore, where oranges and lemons ripen in the sun, are still full of roses—the purple grapes hang overhead as you walk beneath the pergolas. Luscious figs invite you to a banquet, chestnuts lie thick beneath your feet as you wander through the autumn woods. Here the "kindly fruits of the earth” are to be had for the asking. Could there be a place more fitting to sign a peace pact than this?