Now this forecasting disposition has led the writer not only to publish a book of deliberate prophesying, called “Anticipations,” but almost without premeditation to scatter a number of more or less obvious prophecies through his other books.  From first to last he has been writing for twenty years, so that it is possible to check a certain proportion of these anticipations by the things that have happened, Some of these shots have hit remarkably close to the bull’s-eye of reality; there are a number of inners and outers, and some clean misses.  Much that he wrote about in anticipation is now established commonplace.  In 1894 there were still plenty of sceptics of the possibility either of automobiles or aeroplanes; it was not until 1898 that Mr. S.P.  Langley (of the Smithsonian Institute) could send the writer a photograph of a heavier-than-air flying machine actually in the air.  There were articles in the monthly magazines of those days proving that flying was impossible.

One of the writer’s luckiest shots was a description (in “Anticipations” in 1900) of trench warfare, and of a deadlock almost exactly upon the lines of the situation after the battle of the Marne.  And he was fortunate (in the same work) in his estimate of the limitations of submarines.  He anticipated Sir Percy Scott by a year in his doubts of the decisive value of great battleships (see “An Englishman Looks at the World"); and he was sound in denying the decadence of France; in doubting (before the Russo-Japanese struggle) the greatness of the power of Russia, which was still in those days a British bogey; in making Belgium the battle-ground in a coming struggle between the mid-European Powers and the rest of Europe; and (he believes) in foretelling a renascent Poland.  Long before Europe was familiar with the engaging personality of the German Crown Prince, he represented great airships sailing over England (which country had been too unenterprising to make any) under the command of a singularly anticipatory Prince Karl, and in “The World Set Free” the last disturber of the peace is a certain “Balkan Fox.”

In saying, however, here and there that “before such a year so-and-so will happen,” or that “so-and-so will not occur for the next twenty years,” he was generally pretty widely wrong; most of his time estimates are too short; he foretold, for example, a special motor track apart from the high road between London and Brighton before 1910, which is still a dream, but he doubted if effective military aviation or aerial fighting would be possible before 1950, which is a miss on the other side.  He will draw a modest veil over certain still wider misses that the idle may find for themselves in his books; he prefers to count the hits and leave the reckoning of the misses to those who will find a pleasure in it.