story repeats itself. To-day we find large numbers of people
who still cherish the opinion that--save perhaps when on service in
war--it is nothing less than criminal foolishness for men to ascend in
aeroplanes. That attitude of mind persists; the growing safety of
flight has not affected it to any appreciable degree. But those eager
for the progress of aviation need not despair, or imagine that their
particular industry is being treated with any exceptional
disapprobation. They have only to look back a little in our history,
no great distance, and read of the receptions that were accorded the
first pioneers of our railways. Public meetings of protest have not
been held to condemn aviation; yet they were frequent in the days when
the first railways were projected. Vast indignation was indeed aroused;
it was declared to be against all reason, and a matter of appalling
risk, that people should be asked to travel from place to place in
such "engines of destruction." But the railways managed to survive
this storm. They were placed here and there about the country; they
were improved rapidly; and it would be hard, to-day, to find a safer
place than the compartment of a railway train.

Motor-cars, when their turn came, had to go through a similar ordeal.
There was the same indignation, the same chorus of protest; and when
the first of the pioneers, greatly daring, began actually to drive
their cars on the public highway, there were people who believed, and
who declared forcibly, that to permit such machines on our roads was
the crime of the century. Had not these pioneers struggled valiantly,
sparing neither time nor money, it is possible that the motor-car
might have been driven from the highway. But here again progress,
though it was retarded, could not be checked. The motor-car triumphed.
It grew rapidly more reliable, more silent, more pleasing to the eye;
and to-day it glides in thousands along our roads, a pleasure to those
who occupy it, a nuisance neither to pedestrians nor to other wheeled
traffic; more under control when it is well driven, and more ready to
stop quickly when required, than any horsed vehicle which it may have
replaced. At one time the papers were full of such headlines as:
"Another Motor-car Accident." Each small mishap received prominent
attention: and to the majority of people it seemed the wildest folly
to travel in such vehicles. Yet to-day--such is progress--these same
people ride in a motor-ca