European war, there has been discoverable now and again some hint of
insight into the real dangers that await mankind. But such stories as
these degenerate into some accidental, but inferentially glorious,
victory of British arms, and any value in the earlier comments is
swamped in the sentimentality of the fortuitous, and designedly
popular, sequel. In the book now under consideration the conception is
too wide for any such lapses into the maudlin. British interests play
an insignificant part in the drama. We have to consider war not as an
incident in the history of a nation, but as a horrible disgrace in the
history of humanity.

And war is the theme also of _The World Set Free_ (1914), but it leads
here to a theory of reconstruction of which we have no sight in the
earlier work. The opening chapters describe the inception of the
means, the discovery of the new source of energy--a perfectly
reasonable conception--that led to the invention of the "atomic bomb,"
a thing so terribly powerful and continuous in its action that after
the first free use of it in a European outbreak, war became
impossible. As a romance, the book fails. The interest is not centred
in a single character, and we are given somewhat disconnected glimpses
of various phases in the discovery of the new energy, in its
application, and of the catastrophes that follow its use as an
instrument of destruction. The essay form has almost dominated the
method of the novelist, and consequently the essential parable has not
the same force as in _The War in the Air_. Nevertheless, the vision is
there, obscured by reason of its more personal expression; and before
I return to consider the three less pertinent romances interposed
between those that have a more recognisable critical tendency, I wish
to sum up the distinctive attitude of the four just considered.