What we moderns, with our little three hundred years or so of security, do not recognise is that things that go up and down may, given a certain combination of chances, go down steadily, down and down.

What would you do, dear reader—­what should I do—­if a slump went on continually?

And that brings me to the second great danger to our modern civilisation, and that is War.  We have over-developed war.  While we have left our peace organisation to the niggling, slow, self-seeking methods of private enterprise; while we have left the breeding of our peoples to chance, their minds to the halfpenny press and their wealth to the drug manufacturer, we have pushed forward the art of war on severely scientific and Socialist lines; we have put all the collective resources of the community and an enormous proportion of its intelligence and invention ungrudgingly into the improvement and manufacture of the apparatus of destruction.  Great Britain, for example, is content with the railways and fireplaces and types of housing she had fifty years ago; she still uses telephones and the electric light in the most tentative spirit; but every ironclad she had five-and-twenty years ago is old iron now and abandoned.  Everything crawls forward but the science of war; that rushes on.  Of what will happen if presently the guns begin to go off I have no shadow of doubt.  Every year has seen the disproportionate increase until now.  Every modern European state is more or less like a cranky, ill-built steamboat in which some idiot has mounted and loaded a monstrous gun with no apparatus to damp its recoil.  Whether that gun hits or misses when it is fired, of one thing we may be absolutely certain—­it will send the steamboat to the bottom of the sea.

Modern warfare is an insanity, not a sane business proposition.  Its preparation eats more and more into the resources which should be furnishing a developing civilisation; its possibilities of destruction are incalculable.  A new epoch has opened with the coming of the navigable balloon and the flying machine.  To begin with, these things open new gulfs for expenditure; in the end they mean possibilities of destruction beyond all precedent.  Such things as the Zeppelin and the Ville de Paris are only the first pigmy essays of the aeronaut.  It is clear that to be effective, capable of carrying guns and comparatively insensitive to perforation by shot and shell, these things will have to be very much larger and as costly, perhaps, as a first-class cruiser.  Imagine such monsters of the air, and wild financial panic below!

Here, then, are two associated possibilities with which to modify our expectation of an America advancing steadily on the road to an organised civilisation, of New York rebuilding herself in marble, spreading like a garden city over New Jersey and Long Island and New York State, becoming a new and greater Venice, queen of the earth.