And his feelings about the need for preventing it are clear. =Joseph Conrad: Early Cloak and Dagger= In 1907 Joseph Conrad explored this problem from the same point of view in _The Secret Agent_. In the author’s note which introduced the novel, Conrad wrote that a friend had mentioned anarchist activities. This was the germ of the story: I remember, however, remarking on the criminal futility of the whole thing, doctrine, action, mentality; and on the contemptible aspect of the half-crazy pose as of a brazen cheat exploiting the poignant miseries and passionate credulities of a mankind always so tragically eager for self-destruction. That was what made for me its philosophical pretences so unpardonable. Conrad then had his point of view; his recollection of an attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory gave him the outlines of his plot. A “delegate of the Central Red Committee,” Adolf Verloc is actually an informer and agent provocateur for many years in the pay of the embassy of a “great power” (probably Russia). His principal function is to transmit warnings of planned bomb-throwings to insure the safety of “royal, imperial, or grand-ducal journeys....” Called to the embassy, Verloc is told by first secretary Vladimir that the conference in Milan is lagging in its “deliberations upon international action for the suppression of political crime....” England is chiefly responsible, Vladimir tells him. He orders Verloc to provide a stimulus in the form of an attack “with all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy.” Verloc is ordered to blow up the Observatory. Always a businessman and never a terrorist, he is deeply disturbed. Obtaining a bomb, Verloc sends his admiring half-wit brother-in-law Stevie out with it. But Stevie stumbles and blows up himself rather than the Observatory. When Verloc’s wife learns what has happened, she kills him and then commits suicide. To add to the impact of the story, Conrad wove into it the characters of Karl Yundt, an evil old terrorist, and the Professor, a “perfect anarchist” who spends his life in experiments to develop the perfect detonator. In _The Great Tradition_ F. R. Leavis has rightly called this book “one of Conrad’s two supreme masterpieces.” In its structure, its delineation of personality, and its masterful manipulation of point of view, the book is a classic. It is an example of the superiority of the European political novel, one of the finest works in the entire genre.