thunders--and that miraculous mastery which hurls power
like a projectile.

Who can say if this enormous might of electricity alone will not change
the face of war?--the centralized cluster of waves, the irresistible
orbs going infinitely forth to fire and destroy all explosives, lifting
the rooted armor of the earth, choking the subterranean gulfs with
heaps of calcined men--who will be burned up like barren coal,--and
maybe even arousing the earthquakes, and tearing the central fires from
earth's depths like ore!

That will be seen by people who are alive to-day; and yet that vision
of the future so near at hand is only a slight magnification, flitting
through the brain. It terrifies one to think for how short a time
science has been methodical and of useful industry; and after all, is
there anything on earth more marvelously easy than destruction? Who
knows the new mediums it has laid in store? Who knows the limit of
cruelty to which the art of poisoning may go? Who knows if they will
not subject and impress epidemic disease as they do the living
armies--or that it will not emerge, meticulous, invincible, from the
armies of the dead? Who knows by what dread means they will sink in
oblivion this war, which only struck to the ground twenty thousand men
a day, which has invented guns of only seventy-five miles' range, bombs
of only one ton's weight, aeroplanes of only a hundred and fifty miles
an hour, tanks, and submarines which cross the Atlantic? Their costs
have not yet reached in any country the sum total of private fortunes.

But the upheavals we catch sight of, though we can only and hardly
indicate them in figures, will be too much for life. The desperate and
furious disappearance of soldiers will have a limit. We may no longer
be able to count; but Fate will count. Some day the men will be
killed, and the women and children. And they also will disappear--they
who stand erect upon the ignominious death of the soldiers,--they will
disappear along with the huge and palpitating pedestal in which they
were rooted. But they profit by the present, they believe it will last
as long as they, and as they follow each other they say, "After us, the
deluge." Some day all war will cease for want of fighters.

The spectacle of to-morrow is one of agony. Wise men make laughable
efforts to determine what may be, in the ages to come, the cause of the
inhabited world's end. Will it be a comet, the rarefaction of