cutive. In this way the chief
consequence of the love-madness of Roburoff had been to place at the
head of affairs in America the one man of all others most fitted by
descent and ability to carry out such a work, and to this fact its
complete success must in a great measure be attributed.

So perfectly were his plans laid and executed, that right up to the
moment when the signal was given and the plans became actions,
American society went about its daily business without the remotest
suspicion that it was living on the slope of a slumbering volcano
whose fires were so soon to burst forth and finally consume the
social fabric which, despite its splendid exterior, was inwardly as
rotten as were the social fabrics of Rome and Byzantium on the eve of
their fall.

On the 1st of October the cables brought the news of the fall of the
Quadrilateral, the storming of Hamburg, and the retreat of the
British forces on Antwerp. Four days later came the tidings of a
great battle under the walls of Antwerp, in which the British and
German forces, outnumbered ten to one by the innumerable hosts of the
League, had suffered a decisive defeat, which rendered it imperative
for them to fall back upon the Allied fleets in the Scheldt, and to
leave the Netherlands to the mercy of the Tsar and his allies, who
were thus left undisputed masters of the continent of Europe.

This last and crowning victory had been achieved by exactly the same
means which had accomplished all the other triumphs of the campaign,
and therefore there will be no need to enter into any detailed
description of it. Indeed, the fall of the Quadrilateral and the
defeat of the last army of the Alliance round Antwerp would have been
accomplished much more easily and speedily than it had been but for
the fact that the weather, which had been fine up to the end of July,
had suddenly broken, and a succession of violent storms and gales
from the north and north-west had made it impossible for the
war-balloons to be brought into action with any degree of
effectiveness.

During the last week of September the storms had ceased, and then the
work of destruction began. Not even the hitherto impregnable
fortresses of Tournay, Mons, Namur, and Liege had been able to
withstand the assault from the air any better than the forts of
Berlin or the walls of Constantinople. A day's bombardment had
sufficed to reduce them to ruins, and, the chain once broken, the
armies of the League swe