An Englishman Looks at the World | Page 2

and light enough for the new purpose. And here we are! Or,
rather, M. Blériot is!
What does it mean for us?
One meaning, I think, stands out plainly enough, unpalatable enough to
our national pride. This thing from first to last was made abroad. Of all
that made it possible we can only claim so much as is due to the
improvement of the bicycle. Gliding began abroad while our young
men of muscle and courage were braving the dangers of the cricket
field. The motor-car and its engine was being worked out "over there,"
while in this country the mechanically propelled road vehicle, lest it
should frighten the carriage horses of the gentry, was going
meticulously at four miles an hour behind a man with a red flag. Over
there, where the prosperous classes have some regard for education and
some freedom of imaginative play, where people discuss all sorts of
things fearlessly, and have a respect for science, this has been achieved.
And now our insularity is breached by the foreigner who has got ahead
with flying.
It means, I take it, first and foremost for us, that the world cannot wait
for the English.
It is not the first warning we have had. It has been raining warnings

upon us; never was a slacking, dull people so liberally served with
warnings of what was in store for them. But this event--this
foreigner-invented, foreigner-built, foreigner-steered thing, taking our
silver streak as a bird soars across a rivulet--puts the case dramatically.
We have fallen behind in the quality of our manhood. In the men of
means and leisure in this island there was neither enterprise enough,
imagination enough, knowledge nor skill enough to lead in this matter.
I do not see how one can go into the history of this development and
arrive at any other conclusion. The French and Americans can laugh at
our aeroplanes, the Germans are ten years ahead of our poor navigables.
We are displayed a soft, rather backward people. Either we are a people
essentially and incurably inferior, or there is something wrong in our
training, something benumbing in our atmosphere and circumstances.
That is the first and gravest intimation in M. Blériot's feat.
The second is that, in spite of our fleet, this is no longer, from the
military point of view, an inaccessible island.
So long as one had to consider the navigable balloon the aerial side of
warfare remained unimportant. A Zeppelin is little good for any
purpose but scouting and espionage. It can carry very little weight in
proportion to its vast size, and, what is more important, it cannot drop
things without sending itself up like a bubble in soda water. An armada
of navigables sent against this island would end in a dispersed, deflated
state, chiefly in the seas between Orkney and Norway--though I say it
who should not. But these aeroplanes can fly all round the fastest
navigable that ever drove before the wind; they can drop weights, take
up weights, and do all sorts of able, inconvenient things. They are birds.
As for the birds, so for aeroplanes; there is an upward limit of size.
They are not going to be very big, but they are going to be very able
and active. Within a year we shall have--or rather they will
have--aeroplanes capable of starting from Calais, let us say, circling
over London, dropping a hundredweight or so of explosive upon the
printing machines of _The Times_, and returning securely to Calais for
another similar parcel. They are things neither difficult nor costly to
make. For the price of a Dreadnought one might have hundreds. They
will be extremely hard to hit with any sort of missile. I do not think a
large army of under-educated, under-trained, extremely unwilling
conscripts is going to be any good against this sort of thing.

I do not think that the arrival of M. Blériot means a panic resort to
conscription. It is extremely desirable that people should realise that
these foreign machines are not a temporary and incidental advantage
that we can make good by fussing and demanding eight, and saying we
won't wait, and so on, and then subsiding into indolence again. They
are just the first-fruits of a steady, enduring lead that the foreigner has
won. The foreigner is ahead of us in education, and this is especially
true of the middle and upper classes, from which invention and
enterprise come--or, in our own case, do not come. He makes a better
class of man than we do. His science is better than ours. His training is
better than ours. His imagination is livelier. His mind is more active.
His requirements in a novel, for example, are not kindly, sedative pap;
his uncensored plays deal with reality.