“I feel it a duty to state openly and boldly, that if science were to be allowed her full swing, if society would really allow that ‘all is fair in war,’ war might be banished at once from the earth as a game which neither subject nor king dare play at. Globes that could distribute liquid fire could distribute also lethal agents, within the breath of which no man, however puissant, could stand and live. From the summit of Primrose Hill, a few hundred engineers, properly prepared, could render Regent’s Park, in an incredibly short space of time, utterly uninhabitable; or could make an army of men, that should even fill that space, fall with their arms in their hands, prostrate and helpless as the host of Sennacherib. “The question is, shall these things be? I do not see that humanity should revolt, for would it not be better to destroy a host in Regent’s Park by making the men fall as in a mystical sleep, than to let down on them another host to break their bones, tear their limbs asunder and gouge out their entrails with three-cornered pikes; leaving a vast majority undead, and writhing for hours in torments of the damned? I conceive, for one, that science would be blessed in spreading her wings on the blast, and breathing into the face of a desperate horde of men prolonged sleep—for it need not necessarily be a death—which they could not grapple with, and which would yield them up with their implements of murder to an enemy that in the immensity of its power could afford to be merciful as Heaven. “The question is, shall these things be? I think they must be. By what compact can they be stopped? It were improbable that any congress of nations could agree on any code regulating means of destruction; but if it did, it were useless; for science becomes more powerful as she concentrates her forces in the hands of units, so that a nation could only act, by the absolute and individual assent of each of her representatives. Assume, then, that France shall lay war to England, and by superior force of men should place immense hosts, well armed, on English soil. Is it probable that the units would rest in peace and allow sheer brute force to win its way to empire? Or put English troops on French soil, and reverse the question? “To conclude. War has, at this moment, reached, in its details, such an extravagance of horror and cruelty, that it can not be made worse by any art, and can only be made more merciful by being rendered more terribly energetic. Who that had to die from a blow would not rather place his head under Nasmyth’s hammer, than submit it to a drummer-boy armed with a ferrule?” The _Army and Navy Register_ of May 29, 1915, reports that