of communication
upon administrative areas, large or small. This defect in our historical
training has made our minds politically sluggish. We fail to adapt
readily enough. In small things and great alike we are trying to run the
world in areas marked out in or before the eighteenth century,
regardless of the fact that a man or an army or an aeroplane can get in
a few minutes or a few hours to points that it would have taken days or
weeks to reach under the old foot-and-horse conditions. That matters
nothing to the learned men who instruct our statesmen and politicians.
It matters everything from the point of view of social and economic and
political life. And the grave fact to consider is that all the great
states of Europe, except for the unification of Italy and Germany, are
still much of the size and in much the same boundaries that made them
strong and safe in the eighteenth century, that is to say, in the
closing years of the foot-horse period. The British empire grew and was
organized under those conditions, and had to modify itself only a little
to meet the needs of steam shipping. All over the world are its linked
possessions and its ports and coaling stations and fastnesses on the
trade routes. And British people still look at the red-splashed map of
the world with the profoundest self-satisfaction, blind to the swift
changes that are making that scattered empire--if it is to remain an
isolated system--almost the most dangerous conceivable.

Let me ask the British reader who is disposed to sneer at the League of
Nations and say he is very well content with the empire, thank you, to
get his atlas and consider one or two propositions. And, first, let him
think of aviation. I can assure him, because upon this matter I have
some special knowledge, that long-distance air travel for men, for
letters and light goods and for bombs, is continually becoming more
practicable. But the air routes that air transport will follow must go
over a certain amount of land, for this reason that every few hundred
miles at the longest the machine must come down for petrol. A flying
machine with a safe non-stop range of 1500 miles is still a long way
off. It may indeed be permanently impracticable because there seems to
be an upward limit to the size of an aeroplane engine. And now will the
reader take the map of the world and study the air routes from London to
the rest of the empire? He will find them perplexing--if he wants them
t