Page:Robert William Cole - The Struggle for Empire; A Story of the Year 2236 (1900).djvu/16

4 ing showers into the air, while sheets and sprays of water burst forth from clefts in the rock and piles of mimic mountain scenery. Everything in and around the city is contrived on the most colossal and elegant style.

London is now the capital of the world, not, as formerly, from a commercial point of view, but in very fact; for the Anglo-Saxon race long ago absorbed the whole of the globe. The great European war, for which preparations were being made during the latter part of the nineteenth century, broke out with tremendous fury early in the twentieth. England, Germany, and the United States stood arrayed against France, Russia, Austria, Turkey, Italy, and a number of minor States. The earth was shaken by the convulsion. Torrents of blood were shed; armaments, the greatest that the world has ever seen, were totally annihilated in the terrible whirlwind of shot and pestilence. For a long time it seemed as if Great Britain