rs offered to sell their invention to
the British Admiralty, the offer was refused.

It is natural enough that believers in the new art, who devoted years of
disinterested thought and labour to getting it recognized, and who truly
foresaw its enormous importance, should be impatient of so cautious an
attitude. But the attitude itself was also natural and excusable. The
British navy is a great trust, responsible not so much for the progress
of the nation as for its very existence. Untried courses, new
investments, brilliant chances, do not commend themselves to trustees.
By adherence to a tried policy and to accustomed weapons the navy had
ridden out many a storm that threatened national wreckage; what it had
done so often it believed that it could do again; and it was slow to
grasp at new weapons before their value was proved. So the progress of
aerial science followed what, in this country, is the normal course. We
have had many great poets and many great inventors. We sometimes starve
our poets, but we make classics of their works. We sometimes leave our
inventors to struggle unaided with difficulties, but when they succeed
we adopt their inventions as part of the national inheritance, and pay
to their names a respect greater than bounty-fed dependence can ever
command or deserve. Their failures are their own, their successes
belong to their country; and if success brings them no other reward,
they can at least claim a part in the honour universally paid to
soldiers and sailors, whose profession is sacrifice.

As soon as it became clear that no nation could without extreme peril to
itself neglect the new weapon, the Government took up the problem in
earnest. Private enterprise might, no doubt, have been trusted to
improve and develop aircraft for the various uses of peace, but the
question was a question of war. The purposes and ambitions of the German
Empire had again and again been freely expressed, in no moderate
language, and the German menace lay like a long vague shadow across the
peace of Europe. Peaceful citizens, with many other things to think of,
might fail to see it, but no such blindness was possible for those who
had charge of the defences of the country. The Committee of Imperial
Defence, in the few years before the war, took expert advice. The
Government, acting on this advice, furnished us with the nucleus of an
air force. They made their own flying school, and established their own
factory for the o