ffective balance. They did not realise that this age of relative good
fortune was an age of immense but temporary opportunity for their kind.
They complacently assumed a necessary progress towards which they had
no moral responsibility. They did not realise that this security of
progress was a thing still to be won--or lost, and that the time to win
it was a time that passed. They went about their affairs energetically
enough and yet with a curious idleness towards those threatening things.
No one troubled over the real dangers of mankind. They, saw their armies
and navies grow larger and more portentous; some of their ironclads
at the last cost as much as the whole annual expenditure upon advanced
education; they accumulated explosives and the machinery of destruction;
they allowed their national traditions and jealousies to accumulate;
they contemplated a steady enhancement of race hostility as the races
drew closer without concern or understanding, and they permitted
the growth in their midst of an evil-spirited press, mercenary and
unscrupulous, incapable of good, and powerful for evil. The State had
practically no control over the press at all. Quite heedlessly they
allowed this torch-paper to lie at the door of their war magazine for
any spark to fire. The precedents of history were all one tale of the
collapse of civilisations, the dangers of the time were manifest. One is
incredulous now to believe they could not see.

Could mankind have prevented this disaster of the War in the Air?

An idle question that, as idle as to ask could mankind have prevented
the decay that turned Assyria and Babylon to empty deserts or the slow
decline and fall, the gradual social disorganisation, phase by phase,
that closed the chapter of the Empire of the West! They could not,
because they did not, they had not the will to arrest it. What mankind
could achieve with a different will is a speculation as idle as it
is magnificent. And this was no slow decadence that came to the
Europeanised world; those other civilisations rotted and crumbled down,
the Europeanised civilisation was, as it were, blown up. Within the
space of five years it was altogether disintegrated and destroyed. Up
to the very eve of the War in the Air one sees a spacious spectacle of
incessant advance, a world-wide security, enormous areas with highly
organised industry and settled populations, gigantic cities spreading
gigantically, the seas and oceans dotted with