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. Bleriot’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.