Euronews, whose words run along the public wires, relates that the company's board of directors has opened what they call an independent investigation; the company, for its part, asserts that it has no reason to believe that the secrets of its craft or the security of the Americans have been compromised. On Monday, before the bankers' tables opened, the company's shares fell about five per cent. Dan Ives, an analyst at Yorkville Ives & Co, said that Huang had been almost a kind of hero to the shareholders, a man whom many regarded differently from other leaders of business. Who the woman is, whose orders she obeyed, what she saw or could have carried off: neither source says.

But first, as is my habit, let us weigh the nature of the thing. In my book on stones I told how merchants of natron, finding no stone on the shore of the river Belus on which to rest their cooking-pots, took lumps of natron from their ship; and when these were melted by the fire with the sand of the beach, streams of a new liquid flowed out: glass, I mean. From that same sand, purified and cut into the thinnest of wafers, are now made instruments that reckon numberless numbers in an instant. What could be more marvellous? The flint with which our ancestors paved their roads now thinks, or at least imitates a thinker; and we, who spent so many words on amber and the lodestone, had not even a name for this art.

Now hear the price. The wealth of this vast work, equal to the treasuries of kingdoms, rests not on stone but on a man. The analyst himself, in praising, confesses the fault: if one man is a hero, one man can also be a ruin. By a single domestic memorandum, not by earthquake, not by fire, not by war, five per cent vanished. Cleopatra dissolved a pearl, the costliest thing in the world, in vinegar and drank it off in one draught; here there was no queen and no vinegar, only the rumour of a man tottering, and it dissolved so great a sum in a single morning. So flimsy is the faith of the bankers' tables, which worships gods in the shape of men.

I seek an exemplum, not the most famous, but the most apt. For a long time the genius of one old man defended Syracuse: Archimedes' engines lifted Roman ships out of the sea and dashed them down, and Marcellus tried open force in vain. Yet the city was taken, not because the engines failed, but because the guards, slack with feasting and wine on the festival of Diana, neglected the walls where our soldiers climbed up on ladders. Archimedes himself, bent over his figures in the dust, was killed by a soldier who did not know him. The works of genius are immortal, their keepers mortal: so it always was, so it is.

Someone will ask what L. Cassius 'was in the habit of asking again and again in trials: who had benefited'. The company's rivals in the craft of wafers profit while its chief stumbles; and, if the suspicions are true, so do those who had an interest in coming as close as possible to the bedchamber of the chief of the West's art. But this is suspicion, not established fact, and must be kept as such. What I wonder at more is what the reports leave unsaid: who is leading that investigation, whether its findings will be brought to light, how long the thing was denied that was afterwards confessed. A Roman magistrate would ask these questions first.

The remedy is neither new nor obscure. Let the treasures of this art, which now serves war and peace alike, be guarded like the frontier, not like the private property of one house; let no power be staked on the integrity of a single man; let the inquiry be held in the open, the names spoken, and punishment or acquittal follow publicly. I honour inventors, and gladly preserve their names in my books; but genius without a guard is plunder, not protection. Nature gave the sand, genius made the treasure; neither supplies the guard, which is left to man.