Suddenly all the carillons that were still ringing out over the city ceased, and in the midst of the perfect silence the President ascended the rostrum to address the expectant assembly. Although he spoke but a little above his ordinary tone, every word could be heard with perfect distinctness throughout the immense interior of the building, for a system of electric transmitters, a development of the modern telephone, carried his voice simultaneously to a hundred parts of the walls, so that those who were standing farthest from him heard quite as distinctly as those who were close to the rostrum. He began by a brief narration of all that had happened to Aeria and the world since the fatal day on which Olga Romanoff had set foot on the deck of the _Ithuriel_ to the present moment, and made no attempt to conceal or to minimise the tremendous and disastrous consequences that had flowed from that fatal and yet innocent mistake on the part of his son. He confessed that the empire of the air, that priceless legacy which they had received from its first conqueror, had been lost, and that, not only the outside nations of the earth, but even Aeria itself stood upon the eve of a conflict in comparison with which even the War of the Terror itself would prove almost insignificant. All that had been won then had now to be fought for over again, and fought for with weapons the destructiveness of which made impossible any estimate of the carnage and desolation that were about to burst upon the world. Then he described how Alan and Alexis, acting under the orders of the Council, had, after vainly trying to arouse the rulers and senates of Anglo-Saxondom to a sense of their danger and responsibility, proclaimed martial law throughout the whole area of the Federation, reasserted the supremacy which the Council had resigned nearly seven years before, and taken the direct conduct of affairs into their own hands. He told how the manhood of Europe, America, Southern Africa, and Australia had, under the influence of their appeals, roused itself from the sloth of prosperity and the vain dreams of democracy, and under their leadership had mustered millions upon millions strong to oppose those who determined to rivet the chains of despotism once more upon the limbs of free men. The energy and devotion of the two men whose exile was to end that day had accomplished this miracle in less than a twelvemonth. All the mechanical resources of the Federation had been simultaneously devoted to the building of an aerial navy, which already numbered nearly a thousand vessels, and more than a hundred dockyards had achieved the construction of a navy of over a thousand submarine warships, while millions of small-arms had been sent out from Aeria, or manufactured in the arsenals of the Federation for the equipment of the newly-created armies.