a sufficiently large scale to
furnish reliable data on which to forecast the prospects of commercial
aviation. And there is a school rapidly growing up which asserts that
the day of aeroplanes is nearly over. The construction of the giant
airships of to-day and the successful return flight of R34 across
the Atlantic seem to point to the eventual triumph, in spite of its
disadvantages, of the dirigible airship.

This is a hard saying for such of the aeroplane industry as survived
the War period and consolidated itself, and it is but the saying of a
section which bases its belief on the fact that, as was noted in the
very early years of the century, the aeroplane is primarily a war
machine. Moreover, the experience of the War period tended to discredit
the dirigible, since, before the introduction of helium gas,
the inflammability of its buoyant factor placed it at an immense
disadvantage beside the machine dependent on the atmosphere itself for
its lift.

As life runs to-day, it is a long time since Kipling wrote his story of
the airways of a future world and thrust out a prophecy that the bulk
of the world's air traffic would be carried by gas-bag vessels. If the
school which inclines to belief in the dirigible is right in its belief,
as it well may be, then the foresight was uncannily correct, not only
in the matter of the main assumption, but in the detail with which the
writer embroidered it.

On the constructional side, the history of the aeroplane is still so
much in the making that any attempt at a critical history would be
unwise, and it is possible only to record fact, leaving it to the future
for judgment to be passed. But, in a general way, criticism may
be advanced with regard to the place that aeronautics takes in
civilisation. In the past hundred years, the world has made miraculously
rapid strides materially, but moral development has not kept abreast.
Conception of the responsibilities of humanity remains virtually in a
position of a hundred years ago; given a higher conception of life and
its responsibilities, the aeroplane becomes the crowning achievement
of that long series which James Watt inaugurated, the last step in
intercommunication, the chain with which all nations are bound in
a growing prosperity, surely based on moral wellbeing. Without such
conception of the duties as well as the rights of life, this last
achievement of science may yet prove the weapon that shall end
civilisation as men