All chemistry makes flaming fireworks in the sky or spreads in sheets of poison exactly as huge as the huge towns.  Against them no wall avails, no secret armor; and murder enters as invisibly as death itself.  Industry multiplies its magic.  Electricity lets loose its lightnings and 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 water, or the extinction of the sun, that will destroy mankind?  They have forgotten the likeliest and nearest cause—­Suicide.

They who say, “There will always be war,” do not know what they are saying.  They are preyed upon by the common internal malady of shortsight.  They think themselves full of common-sense as they think themselves full of honesty.  In reality, they are revealing the clumsy and limited mentality of the assassins themselves.