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The ancient yarn which represents John Bull remarking, “What a glorious day! Let us go out and kill something,” is defective in one important particular. It is not nearly comprehensive enough. The instinct of destruction is no more a peculiarly British characteristic than is the desire to eat and drink. Scientists have the reputation of being the most mild-mannered of men, yet the amount of ingenuity that has been expended by scientific men of every nation under the sun in devising implements for dealing death wholesale in time of war is almost past belief. If one is to credit the accounts given of their inventions by some of these war cranks, the next European war will see such cumbersome weapons as rifles, cannon, and torpedoes completely discarded
“SCIENTISTS HAVE THE REPUTATION OF BEING THE MOST MILD-MANNERED OF MEN.”
in favour of some contrivance or other which will enable its possessor, by merely pressing a button or pulling a string, to annihilate a whole army or an entire fleet. Everyone remembers how just before the Spanish-American war last year Edison was credited with having discovered some means of sweeping the Spaniards off the face of the earth by a diabolical gas. The precise details of this scheme were never made perfectly clear but it was understood that the gas was to be conveyed in a balloon over the heads of the victims, and was to be discharged at the psychological moment when its fumes would infallibly asphyxiate every living thing within a radius of half a dozen miles. This horrible invention, if it ever passes into the region of practical politics, might prove a popular weapon in the hand of Anarchists, but for the damning fact that its use involves the destruction of the man in charge of the balloon as well as his victims.
But it must not be supposed that the implements of every war crank are as visionary as Edison’s gas. In many cases their engines of destruction have been proved by trials, as satisfactory as any trial short of actual warfare can be, to be perfectly workable. A young
