Are we an awakening people?

It is the vital riddle of our time.  I look out upon the windy Channel and think of all those millions just over there, who seem to get busier and keener every hour.  I could imagine the day of reckoning coming like a swarm of birds.

Here the air is full of the clamour of rich and prosperous people invited to pay taxes, and beyond measure bitter.  They are going to live abroad, cut their charities, dismiss old servants, and do all sorts of silly, vindictive things.  We seem to be doing feeble next-to-nothings in the endowment of research.  Not one in twenty of the boys of the middle and upper classes learns German or gets more than a misleading smattering of physical science.  Most of them never learn to speak French.  Heaven alone knows what they do with their brains!  The British reading and thinking public probably does not number fifty thousand people all told.  It is difficult to see whence the necessary impetus for a national renascence is to come....  The universities are poor and spiritless, with no ambition to lead the country.  I met a Boy Scout recently.  He was hopeful in his way, but a little inadequate, I thought, as a basis for confidence in the future of the Empire.

We have still our Derby Day, of course....

Apart from these patriotic solicitudes, M. Bleriot has set quite another train of thought going in my mind.  The age of natural democracy is surely at an end through these machines.  There comes a time when men will be sorted out into those who will have the knowledge, nerve, and courage to do these splendid, dangerous things, and those who will prefer the humbler level.  I do not think numbers are going to matter so much in the warfare of the future, and that when organised intelligence differs from the majority, the majority will have no adequate power of retort.  The common man with a pike, being only sufficiently indignant and abundant, could chase the eighteenth century gentleman as he chose, but I fail to see what he can do in the way of mischief to an elusive chevalier with wings.  But that opens too wide a discussion for me to enter upon now.

MY FIRST FLIGHT

(Eastbourne, August 5, 1912—­three years later.)

Hitherto my only flights have been flights of imagination but this morning I flew.  I spent about ten or fifteen minutes in the air; we went out to sea, soared up, came back over the land, circled higher, planed steeply down to the water, and I landed with the conviction that I had had only the foretaste of a great store of hitherto unsuspected pleasures.  At the first chance I will go up again, and I will go higher and further.