The attempt to remove militarism and military conceptions from among human preoccupations is a good cause and that I will serve with the only weapon I know how to use--the pen, which they say is mightier than the sword or even the howitzer. Having applied myself to this service before the outbreak of the Great War, which for me began in 1911, I was not to be diverted from it by the panic confusion of those who were overtaken by the calamity rather than prepared for it. With Windmills, my essay on Satire, my critical study of Samuel Butler, the Interlude in Old Mole, I was an active participant in the Great War before it began, but of course no one pays any attention to a prophet, especially when he is enough of an artist to desire to give his prophecy permanent form. That indeed was my mistake. Had I thundered in the accents of Horatio Bottomley instead of clipping my sentences to the mocking murmur of satire I might have been a hero to some one else’s valet, not having one of my own. Peace has her Bottomleys no less renowned than war, but I am afraid I am not among their number, for I have long since returned to the serious business of life, the composition of dramatic works, and I am in the position that most ensures unpopularity, that of being able to say ‘I told you so.’ I am a little alarmed when I consider how closely the Great War followed my prophecy of it and turn to the fables, Gynecologia and Out of Work, which follow logically from the other. A world governed by women as lopsidedly as it has been by men would be much like that depicted here, and the final collapse, if it came, would surely follow the lines indicated in Out of Work. None of us knows exactly of what we are a portent and who can imagine to what Lady Astor’s flight into fame may lead? If I had not already dedicated this book to my friend D. H. Lawrence I would, without her permission, inscribe upon it the name of the first woman to take her Seat in the worst club in London, the House of Commons. GILBERT CANNAN. New York, 1919. Samways Island I: TITTIKER George Samways awoke one night with a vague distressful feeling that all was not well with his island. The moon was shining, but it was casting the shadow of the palm tree in which he slept over the hollow wherein he cooked his meals, and that had never happened before.