GOVERNMENT AND SCIENCE 211 



tions of it as are of more advantage to one nation than to 

 another, and it is better to receive a few millions of pounds 

 from an offending nation, and put our national pride 

 in our pockets, so far as to see that it is wiser to receive the 

 apology of the insulting nation in the form of a pecuniary 

 indemnity as a means of increasing our happiness, industry, 

 wealth land population. The offending nation will realise 

 that it is better to pay the indemnity, than to mortgage its 

 future capital and prosperity by a debt of poverty 

 so enormous as modern and future warfare will entail 

 upon its people, by condemning to death the bodies, 

 and, in some cases, the souls also, when all the 

 members of a family are destroyed, of some of the best classes 

 of our citizens, and by depriving both nations of millions 

 of pounds of capital and millions of livelihoods that vanish 

 and are destroyed in the noisy thunder of war and disappear 

 in the murderous clouds of smoke. Every million means 

 the ruthless destruction of the means of employment of 

 the labour of from four to five hundred breadwinners for a 

 lifetime, at an income of one hundred pounds per annum, and 

 reduces the population to the same extent, to say nothing of 

 the loss of life also entailed ; and I feel sure, since I became 

 possessed of these Tables of Trinity, that the end of war, or 

 at least of international war, is now at hand ; as also that in 

 future nations will combine to reduce armaments and to enforce 

 national justice by some form of national federation, supported 

 by a cosmopolitan army of international police. 



I expect the reader to take these prophetic statements 

 with a small pinch of salt, that is to say, as the merest outline 

 of what will transpire in the future. Nevertheless, I am 

 convinced that they are the shadows which coming events 

 cast before them. It seems to me that the tendency of both 

 science and modern warfare point to the fact that neither 

 prowess, valour, nor religious fanaticism, which have been the 

 dominating factors of the last hundred thousand years, will 

 be of any avail against the mighty costliness that invention has 

 added to modern warfare, and that science, wealth, and capital 

 can only be victorious in future contests. Again, viewing the 

 social discords, so apparently on the increase between man and 

 man, it also appears to my mind that these new combatants 

 will, before this new casus belli is finally settled, bathe the 



