I do not think that the arrival of M. Bleriot 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.  His schools are places for vigorous education instead of genteel athleticism, and his home has books in it, and thought and conversation.  Our homes and schools are relatively dull and uninspiring; there is no intellectual guide or stir in them; and to that we owe this new generation of nicely behaved, unenterprising sons, who play golf and dominate the tailoring of the world, while Brazilians, Frenchmen, Americans and Germans fly.

That we are hopelessly behindhand in aeronautics is not a fact by itself.  It is merely an indication that we are behindhand in our mechanical knowledge and invention M. Bleriot’s aeroplane points also to the fleet.

The struggle for naval supremacy is not merely a struggle in shipbuilding and expenditure.  Much more is it a struggle in knowledge and invention.  It is not the Power that has the most ships or the biggest ships that is going to win in a naval conflict.  It is the Power that thinks quickest of what to do, is most resourceful and inventive.  Eighty Dreadnoughts manned by dull men are only eighty targets for a quicker adversary.  Well, is there any reason to suppose that our Navy is going to keep above the general national level in these things?  Is the Navy bright?

The arrival of M. Bleriot suggests most horribly to me how far behind we must be in all matters of ingenuity, device, and mechanical contrivance.  I am reminded again of the days during the Boer war, when one realised that it had never occurred to our happy-go-lucky Army that it was possible to make a military use of barbed wire or construct a trench to defy shrapnel.  Suppose in the North Sea we got a surprise like that, and fished out a parboiled, half-drowned admiral explaining what a confoundedly slim, unexpected, almost ungentlemanly thing the enemy had done to him.

Very probably the Navy is the exception to the British system; its officers are rescued from the dull homes and dull schools of their class while still of tender years, and shaped after a fashion of their own.  But M. Bleriot reminds us that we may no longer shelter and degenerate behind these blue backs.  And the keenest men at sea are none the worse for having keen men on land behind them.