No words can picture the satanic grandeur of this destruction. The electroid rays seemed to have the quality of paralyzing all life, either because joined to some deadly chemical or because the immense concussion produced sudden deadly vacuums. From the air the tottering city swayed and crumbled into unrecognizable heaps of stone and steel, while great sheets of fire a hundred feet in height leaped over the destruction. Millions died instantly of suffocation or fright while the armada, passing on, swept the country like a plague of fiery locusts, destroying every vestige of plant and animal life. I turned away in horror and rushed into the open air, where I must have swooned, for the next thing I remember I was in Acquilla’s arms and Acquilla’s voice, alarmed and compassionate, was calling my name. I sat up, recollecting myself. “What happened, Bogardus dear?” said Acquilla, passing her hand gently over my forehead. “That awful picture,” I said with a shudder. “How could human beings be so fiendish?” “Oh, you have been looking at the destruction of New York,” Acquilla said, looking at me curiously. “And it has upset you as much as that? And you are a representative of the war age--the age of war? So men were not so different after all?” I put her arm from me indignantly and mastered my emotion, ashamed before a woman to have so betrayed my britannic ancestry. “True, we made war but not on women and children. We left that to savages.” “Your attitude surprises me,” said Acquilla reflectively. “What sentimental creatures you men were after all. What horrifies you? That you saw millions wiped out in an instant? But was there anything less horrible in men dying by the hundreds of thousands?” “But a whole city, a nation, the women and children!” “Really, Bogardus, do you believe that war was not always directed at the women and children? Is it easier to die suddenly or to live blankly and carry on the burden of life? Who suffered most in your romantic age, the lover who died or the lover who remained? As for the horror you imagine, stop and think on this. The destruction you saw was instantaneous, the vibration of the electroid ray paralyzes every nerve instantly. There is no more experience with pain than a bolt of lightning gives. Such a death was virtually an unconscious blotting out. Yet at the same epoch in your sentimentality, you gave to your criminals an instantaneous merciful death and allowed the ones you loved, to die in prolonged agonies. Isn’t that true?” “I don’t know if it is true. It sounds logical,” I admitted unwillingly. “And that is what you men never were!” “At least we were consistent.” “How so?” “You have enslaved my sex, because you say, it lived only to kill. Yet on what have you founded your civilization of peace? On the most gigantic holocaust that the imagination could conceive. I call that inconsistent.”