ompetition often retards it by a network of restrictions and
concealments, and converts knowledge, which ought to be a public trust,
to the darker purposes of private gain. The coming of the war burst
these bonds, and immensely quickened the progress of the science of
flight. Inventors, who are usually poor men, so soon as their country
called on them, put themselves at her disposal, and found their chief
reward in helping to save her at her need.

The course of events during the early years of the twentieth century
left England no time for developing the art of flight in her own
tentative and permissive fashion. The coming of the new art coincided
with the rapid gathering of the storm-cloud that was to burst in the
Great War. In 1903 the Wrights first flew in a power-driven machine. In
1909 the achievements of the Rheims meeting marked the end of the
infancy of the art. In 1912 the Royal Flying Corps was formed. During
this same period of ten years armaments were being piled up by all the
greater European countries, international tension was increasing, and
ominous events, small in themselves, but impressive by the gravity and
solemnity with which they were regarded by the chancelleries of Europe,
recurred in a series of growing intensity and significance. Germany was
not threatened in any part of the world, but Germany was known to
believe in war, and many responsible observers were uneasily and
reluctantly forced to the conviction that Germany intended war, and
would make war for unlimited purposes on any small occasion created or
chosen by herself. The Royal Flying Corps was formed not for far-sighted
ulterior ends, as an instrument of progress and research, but for a very
present need, as a weapon to be placed in the hands of the country on
the day when battle should be joined. Two years before the corps was
formed the aeronautical force at the disposal of the nation was centred
in the balloon factory and balloon school at Aldershot. The naval and
military officers who had interested themselves in aeronautics were few,
but they were competent and enthusiastic; they believed in the air, and
were quick to recognize inventions of promise. The consequence of this
was that the aeroplane and the airship in England, from the very first,
grew up more or less tended by the Government, and received as much
encouragement as could possibly be given under the severe restrictions
of parliamentary finance. Almost every airship tha