The agency which effects this transformation is the discovery of how to release the internal energy of the atom, which we now know exists, although we do not know how to get at it. Since wealth is essentially nothing but energy this means that we have within reach enough to make multi-millionaires of all of us; a tantalizing thought. The new disintegrating element, according to Mr. Wells, is carolinum, an element that Professor Baskerville also discovered on paper a few years ago. This exhaustless supply of energy being utilized in machinery sets free the laborer and swells the army of the unemployed; and since, incidentally, one of the by-products of its decomposition is gold, the financial systems of the world go to smash. But naturally carolinum finds speedy employment in war. A bomb of it buried in the soil becomes a perpetual volcano, half of it exploding every seventeen days. A few bombs of this radioactive element dropped from aeroplanes demolish Paris and Berlin and throw the world into a chaos of confusion, which Wells's characteristic style, with its flashlight visions, its tumultuous phrases, and its shifting points of view, its alternations of generalization and detail, is particularly adapted to depict.

The value of this romance, aside from its interest, lies in the emphatic way in which it teaches the lesson that civilization is primarily a matter of the utilization of natural energy and is measurable in horse power. Unfortunately we have to depend upon the sunshine, either that of the present or of the carboniferous era; we have no key to the treasure-house of the atom. Radium gives out its energy without haste or rest, just as fast at the temperature of liquid air as at the temperature of liquid iron, always keeping itself a little hotter than its surroundings, however hot these may be. If only we could get at this source of exhaustless energy—but let Wells say what that would mean:

Not only should we have a source of power so potent that a man might carry in his hand the energy to light a city for a year, fight a fleet of battleships or drive one of our giant liners across the Atlantic; but we should also have a clue that would enable us at last to quicken the process of disintegration in all the other elements, where decay is still so slow as to escape our finest measurements. Every scrap of solid matter in the world would become an available reservoir of concentrated force.

It would mean a change in human conditions that I can only compare to the discovery of fire, that first discovery that lifted man above the brute. We stand to-day toward radio-activity exactly as our ancestor stood toward fire before he had learnt to make it. He knew it then only as a strange thing utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the volcano, a red destruction that poured through the forest. So it is that we know radio-activity to-day. This—this is the dawn of a new day in human living. At the climax of that civilization which had its beginning in the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the savage, just when it is becoming apparent that our ever-increasing needs cannot be borne indefinitely by our present sources of energy, we discover suddenly the possibility of an entirely new civilization. The energy we need for our very existence, and with which Nature supplies us still so grudgingly, is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all about us. We cannot pick that lock at present, but....

Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual struggle to live on the bare surplus of Nature's energies will cease to be the lot of Man. Man will step from the pinnacle of this civilization to the beginning of the next.[4]

Wells is a futurist in the true sense of the word, appraising all things by what shall come out of them. This led him to a realization of the importance of eugenics long before the fad came in. In "Mankind in the Making" he formulated his test of civilization in these words:

Any collective human enterprise, institution, party, or state, is to be judged as a whole and completely, as it conduces more or less to wholesome and hopeful births and according to the qualitative and quantitative advance due to its influence toward a higher and ampler standard of life.

But when it comes to practical measures for securing these advantages, Wells shows a characteristic timidity. He condemns certain obvious dysgenic measures, such as the action of school boards in imposing celibacy upon women teachers, but in several respects legislation in America has already gone beyond what he ten years ago considered possible. So, too, in his "Anticipations" he suggested as future possibilities inventions and practices that were then familiar to us in this country. It is hard for a man nowadays to be a prophet. If he doesn't look sharp he will find himself an historian instead.

When H. G. Wells in 1902 essayed the rôle of prophet and in his volume entitled "Anticipations" tried to forecast the future of the world on scientific principles, he excited the same popular interest that any guess at coming events arouses, but there were few who took him seriously. Now, however, "Anticipations" makes very interesting reading. Much of it has already come to pass, and we see that Wells's chief mistake lay in putting his forecast too far ahead; for instance, when he says that he is "inclined to believe.... that very probably before 1950 a successful aeroplane will have soared and come home safe and sound."

The chapter on war in "Anticipations" shows astonishing power of prescience in what he says of the use of the submarine and armored automobile, the development of trench warfare, the substitution of the machine gun for the rifle, and the abolition of the distinction between military and civilian parts of a nation. His discussion of the new forms of warfare and the inadequacy of the old methods of management and training is full of warnings which it were well for his country to have heeded. This is shown if we compare that feeling passage in which he describes a future British army setting out to meet a scientifically organized foe with an actual battle on the Artois field as seen from the German side. The first column is quoted from "Anticipations", published fifteen years ago. The second column is taken from Kellermann's picture of the battle of Loos, September 22, 1915, published in the Continental Times of Berlin. Bernard Kellermann, one of the most brilliant of the younger writers of Germany, is well known in America through his novel, "The Tunnel", dealing with a submarine passage to Europe.

THE PROPHECY, 1902

I seem to see, almost as if he were symbolic, the gray old general—the general who learned his art of war away in the vanished nineteenth century, the altogether too elderly general with his epaulettes and decorations, his uniform that has still its historical value, his spurs and his sword—riding along on his obsolete horse, by the side of his doomed column. Above all things he is a gentleman. And the column looks at him lovingly with its countless boys' faces, and the boys' eyes are infinitely trustful, for he has won battles in the old time. They will believe in him to the end. They have been brought up in their schools to believe in him and his class, their mothers have mingled respect for the gentlefolk with the simple doctrines of their faith, their first lesson on entering the army was the salute. The "smart" helmets His Majesty, or some such unqualified person, chose for them lie hotly on their young brows, and over their shoulders slope their obsolete, carelessly-sighted guns. Tramp, tramp, they march, doing what they have been told to do, incapable of doing anything they have not been told to do, trustful and pitiful, marching to wounds and disease, hunger, hardship, and death. They know nothing of what they are going to meet, nothing of what they will have to do; religion and the rate-payer and the rights of the parent working through the instrumentality of the best club in the world have kept their souls and minds, if not untainted, at least only harmlessly veneered with the thinnest sham of training or knowledge. Tramp, tramp, they go, boys who will never be men, rejoicing patriotically in the nation that has thus sent them forth, badly armed, badly clothed, badly led, to be killed in some avoidable quarrel by men unseen. And beside them, an absolute stranger to them, a stranger even in habits of speech and thought, and at any rate to be shot with them fairly and squarely, marches the sub­altern—the son of the school-burking, share-holding class—a slightly taller sort of boy, as ill-taught as they are in all that concerns the realities of life, ignorant of how to get food, how to get water, how to keep fever down and strength up, ignorant of his practical equality with the men beside him, carefully trained under a clerical head­master to use a crib, play cricket rather nicely, look all right whatever happens, believe in his gentility, and avoid talking "shop."

So the gentlemanly old general—the polished drover to the shambles—rides, and his doomed column march by, in this vision that haunts my mind.

I cannot foresee what such a force will even attempt to do against modern weapons. Nothing can happen but the needless and most wasteful and pitiful killing of these poor lads, who make up the infantry battalions, the main mass of all the European armies of to-day, whenever they come against a sanely organized army. There is nowhere they can come in; there is nothing they can do.

The scattered, invisible marks­men with their supporting guns will shatter their masses, pick them off individually, cover their line of retreat and force them into wholesale surrenders. It will be more like herding sheep than actual fighting. Yet the bitterest and crudest things will have to happen, thousands and thousands of poor boys will be smashed in all sorts of dreadful ways and given over to every conceivable form of avoidable hardship and painful disease before the obvious fact that war is no longer a business for half-trained lads in uniform, led by parson-bred sixth-form boys and men of pleasure and old men, but an exhaustive demand upon very carefully educated adults for the most strenuous best that is in them, will get its practical recognition.[5]

THE FULFILLMENT, 1915

They made the essay with absolutely new, absolutely antiquated tactics—tactics which are no longer recognized in this war. It was something really un­heard of! Our staff officers stood and regarded it—their mouths open in astonishment. It was observed, shortly before noon, that the English were advancing toward our positions in dense masses, eight lines deep in echelon—from Loos. A hail of shells that churned up the ground was supposed to smooth the way for the storming columns. At the same time, to the east of Loos (there is a bit of rising ground there scarcely noticeable as you drive over it in a wagon, called Hill 70), we saw English artillery come riding up—quite open—in the broad of day—under the naked heavens! These batteries carried bridge materials with them for the crossing of trenches and natural obstacles. The English general we caught describes this action as one that was especially "sporting." There can be no doubt about its dashing quality. But there was more to come. In the distance, on the level plain, one or two English cavalry regiments were visible—Dragoons of the Guard. Eight lines of infantry? Artillery driving across the open? Cavalry in the background? It was really unbelievable! It was the plan of a veritable pitched battle from a forgotten age, the masterly idea of a senile brain, which had come limping along fifty years behind the times! Generals in our day grow obsolete as rapidly as inventions and sciences. The war has taught us that the blood of nations, the incalculably precious blood, is to be entrusted only to the freshest, the most elastic, the most gifted of military spirits, the very cream of the crop. Those old celebrities of theirs, staggering under their orders, should have been consigned to relay stations by the English. The English troops carried out their attack with a splendid gesture, with admirable bravoure. They were young and they bore no orders on their uniforms. They carried out the commands of their celebrated and senile authorities, carried them out with a blind courage—in this day of mortars, telephones and machine-guns. As magnificent as was their bearing, even so pitiful was the collapse of their onslaught. Before the eightfold storming columns had been able to make ten steps, they came under our combined fire-rifles, machine-guns, cannon. The batteries were lying in wait and they obeyed the telephone. The English knights and baronets had not reckoned with this. Fresh reserves came running up and were mown down in the cross-fire of our machine-guns. Those riding batteries came to a miserable end. They too came within the zone of the machine-guns, and our heavy mortars, notified by telephone, got hold of them so swiftly and so thoroughly, that they were not even given time to unlimber. The regiments of cavalry that were waiting in the background, ready to come dashing through, got salvoes of the heaviest shells full in their faces, and drew back without having drawn a blade from the scabbard. That finished the pitched battle. And the attack broke to pieces in front of our wire entanglements. A prodigious number of their dead lay before our trenches. We had made 800 prisoners, among them a colonel, four majors, and fifteen officers. At a conservative estimate, the losses of the English in this single section of the division, may be fixed in dead and wounded as at least 20,000. It was clear that, apart from a small local success, it had been a disastrous job for the Britishers. Never before has it been so clearly proved that war is not a sport for a dozen or two of privileged dilettantes.[6]