iation has to contend in regard to the geographical features and
position of the United Kingdom. Its comparatively small size, the
propinquity of industrial centres, our efficient day and night express
railway services, especially those running north and south, lessen the
value of aircraft's superior speed and militate against the operation of
successful internal air services. Possible exceptions might include
amphibian services between London and Dublin, accelerating the delivery
of mails five or six hours; between Glasgow and Belfast, where the Clyde
and the harbour of Belfast could be used as terminals; or between London
and the Channel Islands. I may point out in parenthesis that the
development of alighting stations on rivers passing through the centres
of towns is important, as a great deal of time is at present wasted in
reaching the aerodromes necessarily situated some miles outside large
centres of population.

Our immediate opportunities of development near home are therefore
afforded by the air services to Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam; but even
here the saving in time is not great, and our position is unfavourable
compared to that of the United States, where the Post Office saves two
days in the delivery of mails by air between New York and San Francisco;
or compared to that of Germany, where Berlin is within a 350-mile radius
of Copenhagen, Cologne, Munich, Warsaw, and Vienna, which is itself in
an advantageous situation as the junction for a South European system
extending to the Balkan States and the Near East.

The ultimate use of the air, however, is not exemplified by a few
passengers flying daily between London and the Continent any more than
by a few squadrons of fighting craft. In a decade or two overhead
transit will become the main factor in the express delivery of
passengers, mails, and goods. It is the one means left to the Empire of
speeding up world-communication to an extent as yet unrealized. For the
price of a battleship a route to Australia could be organized, the value
of which would be beyond computation.

The British Empire as a whole offers vast fields for expansion. In
Africa, Canada, and Australia are found the great distances suitable to
the operation of aircraft, the wide undeveloped areas through which air
transport may prove more economic than the construction of railways, and
the trans-oceanic routes over which travel by steamship has reached,
and in many cases passed, its ec