Jasper County Democrat, Volume 19, Number 70, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 November 1916 — A VISION OF THE FUTURE [ARTICLE]

A VISION OF THE FUTURE

Writer Secs Time When War Area Will Be Limited. Before 1914 we imagined that there were certain considerable restraints on hostilities hallowed by custom and sanctioned by international agreements. It was supposed that war was a business coilfined to one sex, to belligerents, and to armed forces; it was assumed that states might remain neutral if they chose, and that if they remained neutral their nationals would be immune from loss of life and destruction of property. It was further taken for granted that the number of actual combatants would be a small proportion of the peoples involved In the war, and that loss of life and destruction of property would be confined to more or less definite and limited military areas. There is not one of these limitations which the introducing sweep of the war has not broken down, and not one which does not threaten to disappear altogether in the wars of the future. They will not be restricted by sex. There will be no territorial limits to the war of the future, and distance will provide no prophylactic against the annihilation of space. The war area is a definition of the past, and the Germans who complained that Freiburg—when it was bombed by the French —was outside the sphere of military operations, have already dropped bombs on London: and women and children living almost on the borders of Wales have been killed by Zeppelin raiders coming down central Europe. Ten years ago Count Zeppelin was laboriously seeking to construct a lighter-than-air ship which would travel a few 4ozen miles at eighteen miles an hour; ten years hence it -will be as easy for airships from Europe to drop bombs on the Mississippi valley. Submarines can now cross the Atlantic: ten years hence they will circumnavigate the globe, and if England were beaten in this war, the terms of peace would include the cession of the Bermudas, at least one West Indian island within easy reach of the Panama canal, and a chain of stations across the Pacific. Science, which is depriving Great Britain of her insular security, may not long leave America in its paradise of isolation.—Yale Review.