of war do against a discharge of Y-rays? Our frontiers are protected by electricity. A zone of lightning encircles the Federation. A little spectacled fellow is sitting I know not where, in front of a keyboard. He is our one and only soldier. He has but to touch a key in order to reduce to dust an army of 500,000 men.'
"Morin ceased speaking for a moment; then he continued, speaking more deliberately:
"Were our civilisation threatened, it would not be by any outside enemy. It would be by the enemies from within.'
"'There are such enemies, then ?'
"'We have the anarchists. They are many, fiery, and intelligent. Our chemists and our professors of sciences and letters are almost to a man anarchists. They attribute to the regulation of labour and production the majority of the evils which still afflict society. They argue that humanity will not be happy except in the spontaneous harmony to be born of the total destruction of civilisation. They are dangerous. They would be still more so were we to repress them. To do this, however, we have neither the means nor the desire. We do not possess any power of coercion or repression, and we get along very well without it. In the barbaric ages, men nurtured great illusions in regard to the efficacy of penalties. Our fathers suppressed the judiciary
