rue to the
essential realities; all this array of machine and workshop, all this
marshalled power and purpose, has been the creation of inventor and
business organiser. But are we not a little too free with that word
"_creation_"? Falstaff was a "creation" perhaps, or the Sistine sibyls;
there we have indubitably an end conceived and sought and achieved; but
did these inventors and business organisers do more than heed certain
unavoidable imperatives? Seeking coal they were obliged to mine in a
certain way; seeking steel they had to do this and this and not that and
that; seeking profit they had to obey the imperative of the economy. So
little did they plan their ends that most of these manufacturers speak
with a kind of astonishment of the deadly use to which their works are
put. They find themselves making the new war as a man might wake out of
some drugged condition to find himself strangling his mother.

So that Mr. Pennell's sketchy and transient human figures seem
altogether right to me. He sees these forges, workshops, cranes and the
like, as inhuman and as wonderful as cliffs or great caves or icebergs
or the stars. They are a new aspect of the logic of physical necessity
that made all these older things, and he seizes upon the majesty and
beauty of their dimensions with an entire impartiality. And they are
as impartial. Through all these lithographs runs one present motif, the
motif of the supreme effort of western civilisation to save itself and
the world from the dominance of the reactionary German Imperialism of
modern science. The pictures are arranged to shape out the life of a
shell, from the mine to the great gun; nothing remains of their
history to show except the ammunition dump, the gun in action and the
shell-burst. Upon this theme all these great appearances are strung
to-day. But to-morrow they may be strung upon some other and nobler
purpose. These gigantic beings of which the engineer is the master
and slave, are neither benevolent nor malignant. To-day they produce
destruction, they are the slaves of the spur; to-morrow we hope they
will bridge and carry and house and help again.

For that peace we struggle against the dull inflexibility of the German
Will-to-Power.

V. TANKS

1

It is the British who have produced the "land ironclad" since I returned
from France, and used it apparently with very good effect. I felt no
little chagrin at not seeing them there, because I have a pecul