THE DEBT TO SCIENCE. 
That which has rendered the burden of the war so crushing has been 
the huge scale on which it has been waged, and this has been the direct 
consequence to the extent to which the machinery of peace has been 
utilized in it. Man mastered transport, aviation, telegraphy, and the 
like in order to add to the conveniences of peace; it was a result, though 
not a motive, that he thereby revolutionized war. 
There is one further consideration to be borne in mind if we rightly 
appreciate the relation of science to war, as evidenced by the fateful 
years through which we have just passed. All our advances in know- 
ledge and power of which I have spoken concerned intellect only, and 
not character, and we are learning to our cost that no development of . 
intellect necessarily brought with it moral growth. No better proof 
could have been vouchsafed to us than our recent experience. 
Harr a Century’s Procress. 
The history of the last half-century furnishes us with excellent 
material for appreciating the part which science has played in this war. 
Forty-four years elapsed between the outbreak of the first Franco- 
German war and that of the one that is just concluding. The cireum- 
stances of the two were strikingly alike. In both we find Germany 
choosing her own moment for making a deliberate and long-planned 
attack on France. In both cases she had accumulated a vast army 
furnished with abundant provision of every munitions prescribed by the 
military science of the time. In theory, if not in fact, France was 
similarly equipped. The tactics of the attacking party were the same 
in both wars, and the immediate result in each case was a successful 
invasion of France. Fortunately the parallel goes no further. But 
-the duration of each was sufticient to show the features of a war waged 
with the knowledge and appliances of the time, and thus the earlier war 
furnishes a datum line from which we can measure the changes that 
have had their origin in the scientific progress that has been made in 
the intermediate period. 
SMOKELESS PowpEr. 
The novel features introduced into war now are so many and so 
varied that, either in form or in substances, well-nigh everything has 
been changed. In 1870, neither barbed wire existed nor its remedy, the 
Tanks. The guns then used were mainly field guns, though they were 
associated with a few early attempts at rapid firing by means of 
mechanical guns, such as the’ French mitrailleuse. In the late war, 
however, we find, on the one hand, both armies using in the field large 
numbers of guns of heavy calibre, firing at long ranges; and, on the 
other hand, a new war of position, with its special armament of machine- 
guns, trench mortars, Stokes guns, and hand grenades constituting a 
system of almost continuous hand-to-hand fighting. The old mechani- 
cally-fired quick-firing guns have been superseded by automatic machine- 
guns, which load and fire themselves by the spent energy of the preceding 
discharge, and being no longer dependent on human manipulation, can_ 
fire at any desired rate up to, say, ten shots a second. Aeroplanes report 
by wireless telegraphy particulars of the movement of the enemy and the 
location of his guns, and thus almost destroy the element of surprise 
S49 
