nterprising sons,
who play golf and dominate the tailoring of the world, while Brazilians,
Frenchmen, Americans and Germans fly.

That we are hopelessly behindhand in aeronautics is not a fact by
itself. It is merely an indication that we are behindhand in our
mechanical knowledge and invention M. Bleriot's aeroplane points also to
the fleet.

The struggle for naval supremacy is not merely a struggle in
shipbuilding and expenditure. Much more is it a struggle in knowledge
and invention. It is not the Power that has the most ships or the
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. Bleriot 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. Bleriot 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.

Here the air is full of the clamour of rich and prosperous people
invited to pay taxes, and beyond measure bitter. They are going to live
abroad, cut their charities, dismiss old servants, and do all sorts of
silly, vindictive things. We seem to be doing feeble next-to-nothings
in the endowment of resear