t is not by
mutual imitation that the understanding can come. It is not by erecting
New York sky-scrapers in London that New York can learn the sacred
significance of the towers of Lincoln. It is not by English dukes
importing the daughters of American millionaires that England can get
any glimpse of the democratic dignity of American men. I have the best
of all reasons for knowing that a stranger can be welcomed in America;
and just as he is courteously treated in the country as a stranger, so
he should always be careful to treat it as a strange land. That sort of
imaginative respect, as for something different and even distant, is the
only beginning of any attachment between patriotic peoples. The English
traveller may carry with him at least one word of his own great language
and literature; and whenever he is inclined to say of anything 'This is
passing strange,' he may remember that it was no inconsiderable
Englishman who appended to it the answer, 'And therefore as a stranger
give it welcome.'

_Wells and the World State_

There was recently a highly distinguished gathering to celebrate the
past, present, and especially future triumphs of aviation. Some of the
most brilliant men of the age, such as Mr. H. G. Wells and Mr. J. L.
Garvin, made interesting and important speeches, and many scientific
aviators luminously discussed the new science. Among their graceful
felicitations and grave and quiet analyses a word was said, or a note
was struck, which I myself can never hear, even in the most harmless
after-dinner speech, without an impulse to leap up and yell, and smash
the decanters and wreck the dinner-table.

Long ago, when I was a boy, I heard it with fury; and never since have I
been able to understand any free man hearing it without fury. I heard it
when Bloch, and the old prophets of pacifism by panic, preached that war
would become too horrible for patriots to endure. It sounded to me like
saying that an instrument of torture was being prepared by my dentist,
that would finally cure me of loving my dog. And I felt it again when
all these wise and well-meaning persons began to talk about the
inevitable effect of aviation in bridging the Atlantic, and establishing
alliance and affection between England and America.

I resent the suggestion that a machine can make me bad. But I resent
quite equally the suggestion that a machine can make me good. It might
be the unfortunate fact that a coolness had a