is chaos or the United States of the
World for mankind. There is no other choice. Ten years have but added an
enormous conviction to the message of this book. It remains essentially
right, a pamphlet story--in support of the League to Enforce Peace. K.

THE WAR IN THE AIR

CHAPTER I. OF PROGRESS AND THE SMALLWAYS FAMILY

1

"This here Progress," said Mr. Tom Smallways, "it keeps on."

"You'd hardly think it could keep on," said Mr. Tom Smallways.

It was along before the War in the Air began that Mr. Smallways made
this remark. He was sitting on the fence at the end of his garden and
surveying the great Bun Hill gas-works with an eye that neither praised
nor blamed. Above the clustering gasometers three unfamiliar shapes
appeared, thin, wallowing bladders that flapped and rolled about, and
grew bigger and bigger and rounder and rounder--balloons in course
of inflation for the South of England Aero Club's Saturday-afternoon
ascent.

"They goes up every Saturday," said his neighbour, Mr. Stringer, the
milkman. "It's only yestiday, so to speak, when all London turned out to
see a balloon go over, and now every little place in the country has
its weekly-outings--uppings, rather. It's been the salvation of them gas
companies."

"Larst Satiday I got three barrer-loads of gravel off my petaters," said
Mr. Tom Smallways. "Three barrer-loads! What they dropped as ballase.
Some of the plants was broke, and some was buried."

"Ladies, they say, goes up!"

"I suppose we got to call 'em ladies," said Mr. Tom Smallways.

"Still, it ain't hardly my idea of a lady--flying about in the air, and
throwing gravel at people. It ain't what I been accustomed to consider
ladylike, whether or no."

Mr. Stringer nodded his head approvingly, and for a time they continued
to regard the swelling bulks with expressions that had changed from
indifference to disapproval.

Mr. Tom Smallways was a green-grocer by trade and a gardener by
disposition; his little wife Jessica saw to the shop, and Heaven had
planned him for a peaceful world. Unfortunately Heaven had not planned
a peaceful world for him. He lived in a world of obstinate and incessant
change, and in parts where its operations were unsparingly conspicuous.
Vicissitude was in the very soil he tilled; even his garden was upon a
yearly tenancy, and overshadowed by a huge board that proclaimed it not
so much a garden as an eligible building site. He was horticulture u