Every day that the War lasts forces on us more clearly the fact that Science, not only natural science—­physics and chemistry—­but also the scientific organisation of the State as an instrument of war, has so developed the means of destruction as either to blot out humanity or to leave the greater part of mankind in abject and bitter slavery to the powers that can wield most effectively the instruments of death and of torture, if war between the leading nations breaks out again after an interval of seeming peace.  How warfare has changed within living memory!  Five-and-twenty years ago the highest authority on naval construction spoke with contempt of the submarine as a factor in war at sea.  No one then had solved the old world problem of aerial flight.  Some of the most distinguished men of science regarded the attempts which were then being made as hopeless.  It then seemed still to be a mere dream of poets.  Wireless telegraphy was only a matter of speculation, a thing which a few only thought of as a possibility of the future.  Man has indeed plucked the fruit of the tree of knowledge for his own destruction.  What may be the result of another quarter of a century of like advancement of the knowledge of the means of spreading “death throughout the world and bitter woe”?  It may not be, as Dr. Murray Butler says, that the 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.