How far is this sombre vision a nightmare merely? How far a warning of the things which may come to pass? Mr. Wells requires for his _Götterdämmerung_ no fresh influx of barbarian hordes to smash civilisation brutally to pieces, such as is feared by some: not even the upheaval from below, in the consolidated masses of the poor, which has seemed to M. Anatole France and others a force destined to consume civilisation in fire and blood. He had accepted the undeniable note of the age, that material advance has far transcended moral progress, and that this inequality is full of the elements of danger. Man has wrested secrets from sun and star, equipped himself with apparatus which should make him rival the older gods, stolen, like Prometheus, the fire of heaven to be his servant, and made the earth and the air to obey him. Yet this unparalleled control of dead things has failed to eliminate his silly national jealousies, his little prejudices and selfishnesses, his clumsy determination to make his life a brutal, irrational thing. Mr. Wells outpours his vials of wrath upon the Crowd: the vacant street-bred people, the “common abundant life,” “flowing, in its cheerful, aimless way,” towards the Abyss. His hero, one of this Crowd, Mr. Bert Smallways, is one of “the sort of men who had made England and America what they are.” “He had lived all his life in narrow streets, and between mean houses he could not look over, and in a narrow circle of ideas from which there was no escape. He thought the whole duty of man was to be smarter than his fellows, get his hands, as he put it, ‘on the dibs,’ and have a good time.” But the author need not have gone to the Crowd for his illustration. No lunacy that flourishes amongst the little but is intensified amongst the great. The German Professors, the conversation of an Oxford College Common Room will exhibit as dangerous a combination of truculence and terror as any gathering of patriots at a public-house bar. The war scare of a halfpenny paper, with its frantic appeals to race prejudice and passion, is revealed in deepening imbecilities in sixpenny magazines which circulate amongst the country clergy, or half-crown reviews which lie upon the table of country houses. Countless millions in Europe and Asia and America, “instead of being born rooted in the soil, were born struggling in a torrent they never clearly understood. All the faiths of their fathers had been taken by surprise, and startled into the strangest forms and reactions.” Everywhere in the early twentieth century this observer finds “a sort of heated, irascible stupidity”; everywhere “congested nations in inconvenient areas, stopping the exchange of population and produce with each other, annoying each other with tariffs and every possible commercial vexation, and threatening each other with navies and armies that grow every year more portentious.” * * * * *