* * * * * And of all illusions of the opening twentieth century perhaps the most remarkable is that of security. Already gigantic and novel forces of mechanical invention, upheavals of people, social discontents, are exhibiting a society in the beginnings of change. It would seem likely that the very rapid disintegration, which has taken place in a period of external tranquillity, in beliefs and ideas, may be giving place to a reverse condition: of a time of internal quietude accompanied by large external transformations. With Europe facing an international discontent amongst its industrial peoples, the nations, as an armed camp, heaping up instruments of destruction, the East suddenly awake, the people in England and America writhing in the grasp of a money power more and more concentrated in the hands of enormous Corporations, he would be but a blind prophet who, looking to the future, would assert that all things will continue as until now. A few years back men loved to anticipate an age of innocence and gold; with humanity at last tranquil and satisfied, in the socialistic millennium or the anarchic heaven of childhood. To-day the critic of a less sanguine outlook openly proclaims that modern civilisation carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Two great imaginative writers, M. Anatole France in Paris, Mr. H. G. Wells in London, have presented their visions of the coming end of an age. The picture of the former is more ironical, more completely the cry of Vanity in a world of disillusionment. The picture of the latter is more scientific. Here is one way at least in which the thing may happen, in which the end may come. And if not in this way, yet in any similar and entirely unexpected fashion, arising out of that present danger: the instability which of necessity must prevail when vast implements of destruction are placed in the hands of a civilisation imperfectly self-controlled, and subject to panic fears and hatreds. It is in the realisation of so remarkable a danger that the story of the outbreak of aerial warfare becomes not so much a nightmare vision of the future as a vigorous criticism of the present. Mr. Wells had formerly demanded supernatural machinery to effect his outpouring of calamity and terror. A comet, bearing a strange gas, will make every one sane. With a sudden gasp of amazement, they will realise the essential insanity of the life which they had hitherto regarded as natural to mankind. Martians, descending from the darkened sky, with irresistible powers of heat ray and poisonous dust, will wipe out humanity as a man will wipe out a wasp’s nest. But here[29] he has returned to the solid ground, and without any assumptions but those of but a slight advance in mechanical invention, exhibits the forces which make towards a cosmic overthrow. The apparatus required is not much more than will undoubtedly be furnished within the next half-century. “Flying” is now assured; has