an astounding invention one must always think of the homicidal use to which man may put it. Man has once again stolen the fire of heaven; a new Zeus will punish him for it. Humanity will blindly and with ecstasy invent the instrument of its own destruction. By means of an admirable scientific instrument it will commit wholesale suicide with a beatific smile. Man has already abdicated in favor of a machine. The war that is being waged is a war no longer of men but of material. Man is belittled; the machine surpasses him! A rudimentary intelligence suffices to set the true force in motion. We are still believers in the ancient saying that the true force is manly virtue, the fine, old-fashioned bravery. We have belittled the only thing in the world which might be wholly great--man. Do we profess to worship that bravery of man which all the past has justified? Why, by the scientific character of war it has become--one dares permit himself the blasphemy--almost a sign of inferiority. We reckon upon the mystical value of our bravery, and we send our men by the thousands against an army of tools! By virtue of our century-old prejudices we honor only the man who exposes himself, sacrifices himself, furnishes, however uselessly, his proofs of courage, when the glory of our arms will belong to him who shall most securely have sheltered his divisions behind gigantic steam-hammers! The applied sciences have caused a moral revolution. By riveting man, who is before all else a soul, to material elements, they have destroyed whatever might be justifiable in the great contests of humanity. A paltry little engineer behind his disguised heavy cannon, or with his mitrailleuse under thirty metres of cement, counts for more than our superb heroes with their courage, their loyalty, and their white gloves. Man, chained like a galley-slave to a machine, to a chemical substance, is forced to unlearn what it is to be a man. He appears very intelligent when he is equipped with algebra and terminology; yes, we must grant to matter all that it can give, but pause a little: have you not an impression that something superior is lacking in so abnormal a compound? They have domesticated the forces of nature; they believe themselves Titans; and there they stand glowering at one another like beasts; they cannot distinguish themselves from these material fabrics that surprise and overwhelm them. They call themselves masters of matter, and matter is all the time jeering at them. Engineering genius is probably not the result of a knowledge of matter, but of a knowledge of man." XV At that period people were still dulling their senses with words and stupefying their minds with discussions, if so they might divert them from that one place which for the time being was as the pivot of the world, upon which they had for six months felt that all depended, as two years before all had for ten days depended upon the battle of the Marne.