come to stay. It is merely a matter of years or perhaps months before every external apparatus that the author requires for his apocalypse will be at the disposal of mankind. And with that invention there comes a new epoch in the history of humanity. Given effective flying--to be utilised in war not for the transference of men, but for coercing a nation into submission--the march of events appears to follow a possible chain of sequence. Each nation, armed to the teeth in a world which has scarcely apprehended war--a city-bred people--is to-day restrained from fighting by fear of consequences. Each nation--in this grim forecast--thinking itself secure in the possession of a new invincible weapon, plunges into effort for the overlordship of the world. The German air fleet invades New York. The city, “drinking up the wealth of a continent as Rome once drank up the wealth of the Mediterranean, and Babylon the wealth of the East,” after a hopeless resistance, capitulates. The poor, neglected in their quarters of squalor, like the poor in Paris in 1870, raise the cry that they are betrayed. Sporadic violence against the invader breaks the truce. The Germans, enraged, determine to make an example which will crush out the need for further effort in a cruelty which is ultimately to prove a kindness. Fire and brimstone rain down from the airships, like the fire and brimstone which rained down upon the cities of the plain. At the end New York is a smoking mass of ruins: a cemetery of a million dead. The assumption of terrorism would have been justified had war been operating under the old conditions. Rage and a fury of revenge on such occasion will always overcome cowardice; man, in a kind of madness, will be content to be destroyed, if only he can destroy. It is only when the resistance becomes obviously senseless--when he has no means of hurting his enemy--that he finally accepts the inevitable. But in the new conditions of air-fighting such an equilibrium would never be attained. There are no frontiers that can be guarded. Desperate men, equipping these new craft, can always exact terrible reprisals. In return for New York’s destruction, Berlin is smashed to powder by American airships; in return for Berlin, other American cities. Madness and delirium seize the people: the whole world is at war; modern civilisation blows up and vanishes from the world.