The Genius of Destruction

[Translated from “L’ Évenément.”]

Man is born a vandal. His instinctive joy, his first pleasure is to destroy. From the reminiscences of his primitive savagery, throughout the process of civilization, this barbarous atavism which incites him to destruction and strife adheres to him. War, apart from the sacred causes which arise from the right of legitimate defense, is often nothing else than a manifestation of this instinct. It seems that Man, in imitation of Nature, and even oftener than Nature, offers an example, wants to create cataclysms in obeyance to this fatal heredity. His very genius provokes or produces them; for, since it is a question of catastrophes, the ambition of his knowledge knows no limits, and, devoured by the spirit of Evil, he perfects his engines of disaster and ruin.

Thus Nikola Tesla, a learned American, a rival of the illustrious Edison, has just made a discovery which, when applied to the art of warfare on sea or land, is to furnish to the armies a power of destruction so formidable that one scarcely dares to contemplate its practical results. The secret of this discovery resides in the transmission of electrical energy to distances which, until now, nobody could surmise. By simple atmospheric conduction, and without any wire whatever, the current is to traverse thousands of kilometers, bring mourning and desolation and carry death, silently, invisibly, into the ranks of the enemy, who will not even be aware of the approach of the Camarde and able to defend himself against its unforeseen blow.

It is with such exploits that human wisdom taxes its ingenuity, and one still dares to praise the moral effect of philosophy.

According to Nikola Tesla, the problem solved by him consists in producing and projecting currents of an enormous voltage heretofore unknown to electricians.

By means of this discovery an operator may, in the shelter of his laboratory, his person not exposed to the least danger, in perfect security blow up out at sea boats carrying explosives at incalculable distances and beyond the range of the most powerful guns.

A simple unarmored, unprotected vessel, having not even a cannon on board, but capable of great speed, may become the most terrible adversary of a whole fleet. A single operator in command of a flotilla of small boats, the evolutions of which are controlled by him with mathematic precision, may destroy the enemy's squadrons without having himself run any risk. In the same manner, and with as little danger, he may send into the enemy's port explosives which would produce a disaster similar to an earthquake.

In order to cause the credit to be given to such prophecies to be appreciated, the learned Yankee has constructed a small model of a boat which performs all the evolutions of his prescription. It is terrible in its precision. An electric motor placed at a distance, in another room, controls all its movements automatically and in a reliable manner. And in this way an electrician on board of a flagship seeming quite inoffensive may, with a simplicity which would eclipse the knowledge of the most profound strategists, direct against the enemy small vessels intended to spread death around themselves - death which nobody suspects, which calls unawares and from afar, with the prophetic surprise of a cataclysm prepared by man.

This is terrible, and causes one to shudder when contemplating this power of destruction brought to the height of its terror.

We must not be incredulous, however. Nikola Tesla proposes to instruct the most intellectual and skeptical people on earth. He intends to exhibit at the exposition in 1900 a torpedo of his invention. He will himself direct its movements from New York, without a conducting wire, by simple electric transmission through the high regions of the atmosphere.

And when we have been entertained what will be the result for humanity, thus threatened with the worst catastrophes, at the mercy of an infernal operator endowed with fiendish, almost diabolical power?

The man who could make this discovery knows how to reassure us in this regard. Like all inventors of destructive machines, he claims that his instrument will make the governments which are inclined to create international conflagrations hesitate. The power of destruction of which he disposes is, he says, so unlimited and its employment in war would endow an army with such an instrument of victory, that no country being concerned about the lives of human beings would dare to assume before civilization, before history, the terrible responsibility of a scientific war. On this account Nikola Tesla claims a right to be called a benefactor of humanity.

Posterity will, perhaps, accord him this claim, as well as to others who have, like him, perfected the art of destroying in bulk and at wholesale, dreaming of such numbers of deaths that nobody would want to boast the tragic glory of ever having caused them.

The genius of destruction would seem to have, then, two aims. It creates evil, but mostly good. Through its help the abolition of wars may no longer be a utopia of generous dreamers, an empty dream of enlightened, altruistic thinkers who have compassion with their fellowmen. A blessed era will open up to the people, whose quarrels will be settled in view of the terror of the cataclysms promised by science, views radiant with peace, which has at last conquered over centuries of barbarism, and there will be definite harmony in the entirely pacified universe!

What contradictions of conception is the human mind subject to? At the moment when, thanks to the magnanimous initiative of Czar Nicholas II, the problem of universal disarmament is attracting the attention. The solicitude, of the diplomats of all nations, an inventor, a physicist of the New World, promises us the end of the barbarous international duels by the tragical horror of the work of Death, by an unheard-of improvement in the processes of destruction.

Will the universal peace result, then, from the excess of evil, or from the moral philosophy which springs out of modern civilization? Who can predict it to a certainty?

What does it matter, after all, whether we owe it to the former or the latter, if only some day this sublime utopian dream, this dawn of new times announced by the prophets of humanity, will realize, perhaps, at the beginning of the century which is about to be born.

Paris, November 12.