e
was not only beyond the resources of any individual--hardly a nation on
the globe in the period of its greatest prosperity could have undertaken
such a work. All the nations, then, must now conjoin. They must unite
their resources, and if necessary, exhaust all their hoards, in order to
raise the needed sum.

Negotiations were at once begun. The United States naturally took the
lead, and their leadership was never for a moment questioned abroad.

Washington was selected as the place of meeting for a great congress of
nations. Washington, luckily, had been one of the places which had not
been touched by the Martians. But if Washington had been a city composed
of hotels alone, and every hotel so great as to be a little city in
itself, it would have been utterly insufficient for the accommodation of
the innumerable throngs which now flocked to the banks of the Potomac.
But when was American enterprise unequal to a crisis? The necessary
hotels, lodging-houses and restaurants were constructed with astounding
rapidity. One could see the city growing and expanding day by day and
week after week. It flowed over Georgetown Heights; it leaped the
Potomac; it spread east and west, south and north; square mile after
square mile of territory was buried under the advancing buildings, until
the gigantic city, which had thus grown up like a mushroom in a night,
was fully capable of accommodating all its expected guests.

At first it had been intended that the heads of the various governments
should in person attend this universal congress, but as the enterprise
went on, as the enthusiasm spread, as the necessity for haste became
more apparent through the warning notes which were constantly sounded
from the observatories where the astronomers were nightly beholding new
evidences of threatening preparations in Mars, the kings and queens of
the old world felt that they could not remain at home; that their proper
place was at the new focus and center of the whole world--the city of
Washington. Without concerted action, without interchange of suggestion,
this impulse seemed to seize all the old world monarchs at once.
Suddenly cablegrams flashed to the government at Washington, announcing
that Queen Victoria, the Emperor William, the Czar Nicholas, Alphonso of
Spain, with his mother, Maria Christina; the old emperor Francis Joseph
and the empress Elizabeth, of Austria; King Oscar and Queen Sophia, of
Sweden and Norway; King Humbert and