a power," says Mahan, "is based upon a
flourishing industry." Substitute "air" for "sea" and the analogy is
still true. The Navy owed its origin to our mercantile enterprise and
to-day it depends upon the Mercantile Marine for its reserve power of
men and material. In the same way must air power be built up on
commercial air supremacy. If we accept Mahan, or the dictum of any other
great naval or military historian or strategist, a service air force by
itself is not air power, and after a brief if brilliant flash must
wither if reserves are not immediately at hand. A large commercial air
fleet will provide, not only a reserve of men and machines, but it will
keep in existence an aircraft industry, with its designing and
constructional staffs, capable of quick and wide expansion in emergency;
and such an industry will not be employed on the design of contrivances
for use in a possible war, but on meeting the practical requirements of
everyday air transport and navigation.

Thus a natural, practical and healthy, as opposed to a stereotyped and
artificial, growth will be ensured. Our naval supremacy is largely
attributable to the interest which the people as a whole have
traditionally taken in naval policy; in other words, to the fact that we
are a seafaring nation. Similarly air supremacy can only be secured if
the air-sense of the man in the street is fostered, and aviation is not
confined to military operations, but becomes a part of everyday life. At
the present time commercial aviation is far too small to play the part
of reservoir to the Royal Air Force--an object which must constitute one
of the principal claims for support of the nucleus already in existence.

CIVIL AVIATION AS AN INSTRUMENT OF IMPERIAL PROGRESS.

Civil aviation, however, has not only an indirect military, but, with
its superiority in speed over other means of transport, a direct
commercial utility. The nation which first substitutes aircraft for
other means of transport will be more than half-way towards the
supremacy of the air. Moreover, as the Roman Empire was built upon its
roads and as the foundations of the British Empire have hitherto rested
upon its shipping, as steam, the cable and wireless have each in turn
been harnessed to the work of speeding up communications, so to-day,
with the opening of a new era of Imperial co-operation and consultation,
this new means of transport by air, with a speed hitherto undreamed of,
must be utilized