y the instruments of death and of
torture, if war between the leading nations breaks out again after an
interval of seeming peace. How warfare has changed within living memory!
Five-and-twenty years ago the highest authority on naval construction
spoke with contempt of the submarine as a factor in war at sea. No one
then had solved the old world problem of aerial flight. Some of the most
distinguished men of science regarded the attempts which were then being
made as hopeless. It then seemed still to be a mere dream of poets.
Wireless telegraphy was only a matter of speculation, a thing which a
few only thought of as a possibility of the future. Man has indeed
plucked the fruit of the tree of knowledge for his own destruction. What
may be the result of another quarter of a century of like advancement of
the knowledge of the means of spreading "death throughout the world and
bitter woe"? It may not be, as Dr. Murray Butler says, that the
strongest man will remain alone in a depopulated world. The strongest
may succumb to the inventions for destruction and the survivors may be a
few of those maimed or weakened by disease whom the storm has passed
over as too obscure, of too little importance even for the messengers of
Death to remember and to relieve from their misery. This is not
rhetorical exaggeration. The weapons of offence regularly win in their
race with the weapons of defence. Fortresses that took years to
construct are shattered in a day. The ironclad is sunk by the torpedo.
How very little margin lay between this country and starvation through
action of submarines! Suppose the enemy had possessed five times as many
submarines from the first, would our defensive measures have prevailed?
How small an extension in the enemy's power in the air would have
enabled him in a single night to leave London a mass of ruins, its whole
population which had not fled dying in torment from poisonous gases!
Another five-and-twenty years of advance in scientific knowledge equal
to that of the last five-and-twenty years may easily make such a result
possible.

But some man--one of those who never look beyond the next year and their
own street, and expects always to carry on business as usual--will say
that the nations will be exhausted and tired of war, and this War will
be the last. Dare any country trust to that unless a new spirit is
infused into the nations and definite steps are taken to prevent war?
Did those who had the best