tandards of the "Jehad."
For some weeks of warfare and destruction it seemed as though the
Confederation of Eastern Asia must needs conquer the world, and then
the jerry-built "modern" civilisation of China too gave way under
the strain. The teeming and peaceful population of China had been
"westernised" during the opening years of the twentieth century with
the deepest resentment and reluctance; they had been dragooned and
disciplined under Japanese and European--influence into an acquiescence
with sanitary methods, police controls, military service, and wholesale
process of exploitation against which their whole tradition rebelled.
Under the stresses of the war their endurance reached the breaking
point, the whole of China rose in incoherent revolt, and the practical
destruction of the central government at Pekin by a handful of British
and German airships that had escaped from the main battles rendered that
revolt invincible. In Yokohama appeared barricades, the black flag and
the social revolution. With that the whole world became a welter of
conflict.

So that a universal social collapse followed, as it were a logical
consequence, upon world-wide war. Wherever there were great populations,
great masses of people found themselves without work, without money,
and unable to get food. Famine was in every working-class quarter in
the world within three weeks of the beginning of the war. Within a
month there was not a city anywhere in which the ordinary law and social
procedure had not been replaced by some form of emergency control, in
which firearms and military executions were not being used to keep
order and prevent violence. And still in the poorer quarters, and in the
populous districts, and even here and there already among those who had
been wealthy, famine spread.

3

So what historians have come to call the Phase of the Emergency
Committees sprang from the opening phase and from the phase of social
collapse. Then followed a period of vehement and passionate conflict
against disintegration; everywhere the struggle to keep order and to
keep fighting went on. And at the same time the character of the war
altered through the replacement of the huge gas-filled airships by
flying-machines as the instruments of war. So soon as the big fleet
engagements were over, the Asiatics endeavoured to establish in close
proximity to the more vulnerable points of the countries against which
they were acting, fortified centres