PREFACE TO THE FOURTH VOLUME
Here, following up "The Sleeper Awakes" and "A Dream of Armageddon," is a book "Anticipations," which was written at the opening of the present century. Although in strict chronological order several other books intervened, the writer has put them in this order because the one arises in natural sequence out of the other. He does not want them to stand too far apart. After producing the rather scattered suggestiveness of "The Sleeper Awakes" and its associated short story, and stimulated perhaps by the fact that every one about him was summing up the events of the past hundred years, the writer set himself, with such equipment as he possessed, to work out the probabilities of contemporary tendencies as thoroughly as possible, and instead of a story make a genuine forecast.
This forecast was made just a quarter of a century ago, and the chief thing about it that strikes its author upon rereading it is that it is very largely contemporaneous. Much of the guessing in it has been amply confirmed; the Great War of 1914-18 was fairly well foretold, the decay of Petersburg, the renascence of France and the defeat of Germany. The tank appears in a footnote, sixteen years before it penetrated to the military intelligence of any country in the world. There was, however, the reader
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