These wars occupying only months at this period, would have occupied scores of years had they been events of the mid-nineteenth century. But with the perfection of hideousness--one might safely write _Hellishness_--of war's latest devices the work of destruction, and almost annihilation became short and sharp. Aerial warfare helped to bring about this consummation more speedily. The firing of a bomb or of a torpedo from an aerial war engine often accomplished in an hour what could not have been accomplished, a few years before, under months, often years of old-fashioned war. These fearful conflicts were not confined to those of kingdom and nation against kingdom and nation, but citizens of one city fought with themselves, civil war was "on the rampage." The lust of war, the lust of blood, born of vile passions, burned in the breasts of men and women--for with the growth of the "woman's rights" question, and the establishment of the "equality of the sexes," bands of women fought bands of women. These Amazons, indeed, wrought even fouler cruelties and butcheries than the men, for as there is no fouler odour under the sun than that of rotted lilies, so the depths to which "the lilies of the human kind"--women--will descend is fouler and deeper than the abysses of fall of men. The hideous wars--international, civil, and _personal_ conflicts--resulted, as wars ever do, in famine and pestilence. Only in this case, these later horrors had been fearfully aggravated, terribly prolonged. The picture of the famine is most striking. The rider of the black horse is shown bearing a pair of scales, typifying the exactitude of weight--for single grains counted in these days. A man's full day's wage would purchase only a pint and a half of wheat (a choenix) and that would form but a _scant_ feeding for the day for himself. But there will then not be wheat enough to go round, and people will hail barley with the rapture of starving souls. The tendency of the days in which we write these lines, is an ever-increasing luxury in eating and drinking, and this, too, among all classes. That tendency will increase more and more, so that the inhabitants of the famine stricken earth will feel scarcity more than they would otherwise have done. The pestilence followed the famine, until from war, famine, and pestilence a fourth of the entire population of the earth was swept away. During the last twelve months quite a crop of false Christs had arisen. Each of these, in his turn, had had a certain following for a brief period, and each had had an untimely end.