are tested by such a new development as that of aeroplanes or airships
we show ourselves in comparison with the more braced-up nations of the
Continent backward, unorganised unimaginative, unenterprising?

Our supreme want to-day, if we are to continue a belligerent people, is
a greater supply of able educated men, versatile men capable of engines,
of aviation, of invention, of leading and initiative. We need more
laboratories, more scholarships out of the general mass of elementary
scholars, a quasi-military discipline in our colleges and a great array
of new colleges, a much readier access to instruction in aviation and
military and naval practice. And if we are to have national service let
us begin with it where it is needed most and where it is least likely to
disorganise our social and economic life; let us begin at the top. Let
us begin with the educated and propertied classes and exact a couple of
years' service in a destroyer or a waterplane, or an airship, or a,
research laboratory, or a training camp, from the sons of everybody who,
let us say, pays income tax without deductions. Let us mix with these a
big proportion--a proportion we may increase steadily--of keen
scholarship men from the elementary schools. Such a braced-up class as
we should create in this way would give us the realities of military
power, which are enterprise, knowledge, and invention; and at the same
time it would add to and not subtract from the economic wealth of the
community Make men; that is the only sane, permanent preparation for
war. So we should develop a strength and create a tradition that would
not rust nor grow old-fashioned in all the years to come.

THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL

Circumstances have made me think a good deal at different times about
the business of writing novels, and what it means, and is, and may be;
and I was a professional critic of novels long before I wrote them. I
have been writing novels, or writing about novels, for the last twenty
years. It seems only yesterday that I wrote a review--the first long and
appreciative review he had--of Mr. Joseph Conrad's "Almayer's Folly" in
the _Saturday Review_. When a man has focussed so much of his life upon
the novel, it is not reasonable to expect him to take too modest or
apologetic a view of it. I consider the novel an important and necessary
thing indeed in that complicated system of uneasy adjustments and
readjustments which is modern civilisation I make