at our aeroplanes, the Germans are ten years ahead of our poor
navigables. We are displayed a soft, rather backward people. Either we
are a people essentially and incurably inferior, or there is something
wrong in our training, something benumbing in our atmosphere and
circumstances. That is the first and gravest intimation in M. Blériot's
feat.

The second is that, in spite of our fleet, this is no longer, from the
military point of view, an inaccessible island.

So long as one had to consider the navigable balloon the aerial side of
warfare remained unimportant. A Zeppelin is little good for any purpose
but scouting and espionage. It can carry very little weight in
proportion to its vast size, and, what is more important, it cannot drop
things without sending itself up like a bubble in soda water. An armada
of navigables sent against this island would end in a dispersed,
deflated state, chiefly in the seas between Orkney and Norway--though I
say it who should not. But these aeroplanes can fly all round the
fastest navigable that ever drove before the wind; they can drop
weights, take up weights, and do all sorts of able, inconvenient things.
They are birds. As for the birds, so for aeroplanes; there is an upward
limit of size. They are not going to be very big, but they are going to
be very able and active. Within a year we shall have--or rather _they_
will have--aeroplanes capable of starting from Calais, let us say,
circling over London, dropping a hundredweight or so of explosive upon
the printing machines of _The Times_, and returning securely to Calais
for another similar parcel. They are things neither difficult nor costly
to make. For the price of a Dreadnought one might have hundreds. They
will be extremely hard to hit with any sort of missile. I do not think a
large army of under-educated, under-trained, extremely unwilling