biggest ships that is going to win in a naval conflict. It is the Power
that thinks quickest of what to do, is most resourceful and inventive.
Eighty Dreadnoughts manned by dull men are only eighty targets for a
quicker adversary. Well, is there any reason to suppose that our Navy
is going to keep above the general national level in these things? Is
the Navy _bright_?

The arrival of M. Blériot suggests most horribly to me how far behind we
must be in all matters of ingenuity, device, and mechanical contrivance.
I am reminded again of the days during the Boer war, when one realised
that it had never occurred to our happy-go-lucky Army that it was
possible to make a military use of barbed wire or construct a trench to
defy shrapnel. Suppose in the North Sea we got a surprise like that, and
fished out a parboiled, half-drowned admiral explaining what a
confoundedly slim, unexpected, almost ungentlemanly thing the enemy had
done to him.

Very probably the Navy is the exception to the British system; its
officers are rescued from the dull homes and dull schools of their class
while still of tender years, and shaped after a fashion of their own.
But M. Blériot reminds us that we may no longer shelter and degenerate
behind these blue backs. And the keenest men at sea are none the worse
for having keen men on land behind them.

Are we an awakening people?

It is the vital riddle of our time. I look out upon the windy Channel
and think of all those millions just over there, who seem to get busier
and keener every hour. I could imagine the day of reckoning coming like
a swarm of birds.