“The experiments are perfected. The kites--and they are as beautiful as they are deadly--can be sent by electricity to an incalculable distance, and each one will rain down dynamite enough to kill a thousand men at a time if they are close enough together. The generators to charge storage batteries have, by other experiments, been so reduced in size and weight that they hardly count among the effects of a travelling army. The enemy could be routed in ten minutes. Even balloons are not necessary, except for reconnoitring. You also know of the other invention, no less important. That is perfected. The steel forts are not only impregnable, but the secret has been discovered of moving electrically operated machines over any sort of ground. So far, moving forts, bicycles, automobiles have been useless except on good roads. These forts will travel without so much as a lowering of speed over the worst that nature has to offer; there is even an apparatus, on the principles of the flying-machine, which will carry them over swamps and rivers. Do you see my drift?” The Emperor’s face would have looked like wax but for the severity of its lines. “Good God!” he muttered finally. “If this is true it will make you the master of the world.” “It will make you the master of Europe.” “What riddle now?” He spoke thickly, but involuntarily twitched his shoulders. He was quick to resent any attempt to manage him. “The Spanish War has come and gone. I have no use for these new weapons of war. They must be used at once, for ideas are microbes. A few years hence--a year hence--and the discoveries may be universal. If I had never met Ranata I should have presented them to you and told you to go ahead, and in the name of humanity wipe Russia and Turkey, in the form they now exist, off the map. I want to see you at the helm while you are still young, and discouragements and disappointments have not crushed all the enthusiasm out of you. The world has waited and waited for you to do the great thing, not realizing your difficulties, and that it was your purpose to make Germany strong and prosperous before launching it into a great war; your crusade will be looked upon as quite in keeping with your character. And you are the only man on this side of the water capable of handling a great empire. So, I repeat, I should have offered you this new power in any case. Now I ask you to use it as a bait for the Emperor of Austria. Owing to your alliance it would be a natural act; unless you could afford to wait for his death, which you cannot. Tell him that if he refuses you will swallow him too. But he can hardly hesitate to snatch at the one compensation for the failures of his reign and life. Such of the conquered territory as you may have to yield to him will flow to you naturally at his death, for his heir could not hold it, and you may be sure that, as the initiator of so magnificent and beneficent a conquest, and as the