In other days I had heard Aylmer Lancing, as he wheeled himself with slow impatience about his workroom, muttering of a dread project to corner the raw material of high explosives throughout the world. Some Central American republic was causing him trouble; and he had decided to make future wars impossible. Later, I had been present when Raymond Stornaway schemed to force up the standard of living for manual labour by paying uneconomic wages in one place and raising a storm of envious discontent in every other. Both men had been wonderfully convincing; but they had done nothing. Behind O’Rane’s shining eyes, in a stain of shadow between two white sheets of sunshine, I seemed now to see Raymond’s tired face at his luncheon-party on Armistice Day. “So far,” said O’Rane thoughtfully, “no one’s gone about it in the right way.” “It was not for want of intelligence. Can it be that the modern world has grown too fast for any one to control it?” If I had not parted with my little monograph on the war, I should have liked to explore this idea that civilization was bursting like an overripe fruit. Everywhere, in my own lifetime, I had seen fourth-dimensional energy collecting in a world of three dimensions. At a far distance, I had watched the Harrimans and Carnegies and Rockefellers bowing under wealth too great for a single man’s direction; and, since we began to raise men a hundred thousand at a time and to spend money at the rate of millions a day, I was convinced that we were operating forces which we could not control. For twenty years I had tried to “think imperially”, but I doubt if Mr. Chamberlain himself would have recognized the British Empire as I saw it represented from my window at the Admiralty on Armistice Day: in fifty years it had changed to something that might become a federation of British states but had certainly ceased to be an empire. America had ceased to be a nation without becoming even a federation. When I heard of a gas that would destroy whole cities, when I read of private fortunes that could buy whole countries, I felt that the earth was hardly big enough for its Rockefellers and Hearsts and Fords; the Rockefellers and Hearsts and Fords themselves seemed hardly big enough for the monsters they had created. “No one,” said O’Rane, “has spent twelve hundred thousand a year to spread his own doctrines. We’ll buy up derelict palaces like Braye and Eldridge; turn ’em into schools for the new poor who can’t afford Eton and the new rich who can’t get in. We’ll stuff them with scholarships to attract the brightest wits; we’ll have our subjects taught, as we want them taught, by giving prizes at Oxford and Cambridge. And, when the best men in every profession, every walk of life, are men who’ve been through our mill, we can convert the world.”