strongest man will remain alone in a depopulated world. The strongest
may succumb to the inventions for destruction and the survivors may be a
few of those maimed or weakened by disease whom the storm has passed
over as too obscure, of too little importance even for the messengers of
Death to remember and to relieve from their misery. This is not
rhetorical exaggeration. The weapons of offence regularly win in their
race with the weapons of defence. Fortresses that took years to
construct are shattered in a day. The ironclad is sunk by the torpedo.
How very little margin lay between this country and starvation through
action of submarines! Suppose the enemy had possessed five times as many
submarines from the first, would our defensive measures have prevailed?
How small an extension in the enemy's power in the air would have
enabled him in a single night to leave London a mass of ruins, its whole
population which had not fled dying in torment from poisonous gases!
Another five-and-twenty years of advance in scientific knowledge equal
to that of the last five-and-twenty years may easily make such a result
possible.

But some man--one of those who never look beyond the next year and their
own street, and expects always to carry on business as usual--will say
that the nations will be exhausted and tired of war, and this War will
be the last. Dare any country trust to that unless a new spirit is
infused into the nations and definite steps are taken to prevent war?
Did those who had the best means of knowledge--the Government of the
day--imagine that such a war as this would break out suddenly? If they
did, they would be guilty of a crime almost unparalleled in leaving us
so unprepared and fiddling with such questions--"Welsh Disestablishment"
and the like--as occupied their time and attention and excited the
political controversies of the months and years immediately preceding
the War.