No sooner had the column with the Emden flag appeared at the entrance of the station than there burst from 10,000 throats a rousing "Hurrah!" On a torpedo boat that had been waiting for them the crew crossed the Bosporus, in which all ships had decked themselves with flags, and landed on the wide park-like point of the seraglio. There, surrounded by new countless crowds, were the Ministers Enver Pasha and Talaat Bey, the German Ambassador, Freiherr von Wangenheim, and Marshal von der Golz Pasha, the combined navy corps of officers, General Bronsart von Schellendorf, all waiting their arrival. [Illustration: ENVER PASHA The All-Powerful Turkish Minister of War] [Illustration: PRINCE SAID HALIM The Grand Vizier of Turkey] Amid the strains of the German national anthem, played by the Turkish military band, Lieut. Capt. von Mücke, together with the War Minister, Enver Pasha, paced along the long German and Turkish fronts. Then he led forth his forty-four men and marched, amid new ovations, all through Stamboul, across the great bridge to Galata, to the deck of the steamship General, at the head of his little band, now grown epic, amid the cheers of Byzantium, on which he and his officers had never set foot before--always in the clear blue and sunlight of this war-heavy Whitsuntide day. But nothing stirred me more deeply on the whole journey than that cold official report of the man who was being celebrated, before his Admiral, and I saw in that lowered swordpoint the symbol of the old and incorruptible Prussian spirit. [Illustration] Civilization at the Breaking Point By H.G. Wells. [Copyright, 1915, by THE NEW YORK TIMES Company.] The submarine and aircraft have put a new proposition before the world. It is a proposition that will be stated here as plainly and simply as possible. These two inventions present mankind with a choice of two alternatives, or, to vary the phrase, they mark quite definitely that we are at the parting of two ways; either mankind must succeed within quite a brief period of years now in establishing a world State, a world Government of some sort able to prevent war, or civilization as we know it must break up into a system of warring communities, perpetually on the warpath, perpetually insecure and engaged in undying national vendettas. These consequences have been latent in all the development of scientific warfare that has been going on during the last century; they are inherent in the characteristics of the aircraft and of the submarine for any one to see. They are so manifestly inherent that even before this war speculative minds had pointed out the direction to which these inventions pointed, but now, after more than three-quarters of a year of war, it is possible to approach this question, no longer as something as yet fantastically outside the experience of mankind, but as something supported by countless witnesses, something which the dullest, least imaginative minds can receive and ponder.