he
muddling which had cost so many gallant lives and so many millions of
treasure during the Boer War, when it took three hundred thousand
British troops to reduce eighty thousand undrilled farmers to
submission. What if the same blundering and muddling happened now? And
it was just as likely now as then.

Men ground their teeth, and looked at their strong, useless hands, and
cursed theorist and politician alike. And meanwhile the Cabinet was
sitting, deliberating, as best it might, over the tidings of disaster.
The House of Commons, after voting full powers to the Cabinet and the
Council of Defence, had been united at last by the common and immediate
danger, and members of all parties were hurrying away to their
constituencies to do what they could to help in organising the defence
of their homeland.

There was one fact which stood out before all others, as clearly as an
electric light among a lot of candles, and, now that it was too late, no
one recognised it with more bitter conviction than those who had made it
the consistent policy of both Conservative and Liberal Governments, and
of the Executive Departments, to discourage invention outside the
charmed circle of the Services, and to drive the civilian inventor
abroad.

Again and again, designs of practical airships--not gas-bags which could
only be dragged slowly against a moderate wind, but flying machines
which conquered the wind and used it as a bird does--had been submitted
to the War Office during the last six or seven years, and had been
pooh-poohed or pigeon-holed by some sapient permanent official--and now
the penalty of stupidity and neglect had to be paid.

The complete descriptions of the tragedy that had been and was being
enacted at Portsmouth that were constantly arriving in Downing Street
left no possibility of doubt that the forts had been destroyed and the
_Spartiate_ blown up by torpedoes from the air--from which fact it was
necessary to draw the terrible inference that the enemy had possessed
themselves of the command of the air.

What was the command of the sea worth after that? What was the fighting
value of the mightiest battleship that floated when pitted against a
practically unassailable enemy, which had nothing to do but drop
torpedoes, loaded with high explosives, on her decks and down her
funnels until her very vitals were torn to pieces, her ammunition
exploded, and her crew stunned by concussion or suffocated by poisonous
gas?