erial, the engines, the gas plant,
and the design, it was really not more complicated and far easier than
an ordinary wooden boat had been a hundred years before. And now from
Cape Horn to Nova Zembla, and from Canton round to Canton again, there
were factories and workshops and industrial resources.

And the German airships were barely in sight of the Atlantic waters, the
first Asiatic fleet was scarcely reported from Upper Burmah, before the
fantastic fabric of credit and finance that had held the world together
economically for a hundred years strained and snapped. A tornado of
realisation swept through every stock exchange in the world; banks
stopped payment, business shrank and ceased, factories ran on for a
day or so by a sort of inertia, completing the orders of bankrupt and
extinguished customers, then stopped. The New York Bert Smallways saw,
for all its glare of light and traffic, was in the pit of an economic
and financial collapse unparalleled in history. The flow of the food
supply was already a little checked. And before the world-war had lasted
two weeks--by the time, that is, that mast was rigged in Labrador--there
was not a city or town in the world outside China, however far from
the actual centres of destruction, where police and government were not
adopting special emergency methods to deal with a want of food and a
glut of unemployed people.

The special peculiarities of aerial warfare were of such a nature as
to trend, once it had begun, almost inevitably towards social
disorganisation. The first of these peculiarities was brought home
to the Germans in their attack upon New York; the immense power of
destruction an airship has over the thing below, and its relative
inability to occupy or police or guard or garrison a surrendered
position. Necessarily, in the face of urban populations in a state
of economic disorganisation and infuriated and starving, this led to
violent and destructive collisions, and even where the air-fleet floated
inactive above, there would be civil conflict and passionate disorder
below. Nothing comparable to this state of affairs had been known in
the previous history of warfare, unless we take such a case as that of
a nineteenth century warship attacking some large savage or barbaric
settlement, or one of those naval bombardments that disfigure the
history of Great Britain in the late eighteenth century. Then, indeed,
there had been cruelties and destruction that faintly f