risen between myself and
Mr. Fitzarlington Blenkinsop, inhabiting the suburban villa and garden
next to mine; and I might even be largely to blame for it. But if
somebody told me that a new kind of lawn-mower had just been invented,
of so cunning a structure that I should be forced to become a
bosom-friend of Mr. Blenkinsop whether I liked it or not, I should be
very much annoyed. I should be moved to say that if that was the only
way of cutting my grass I would not cut my grass, but continue to cut my
neighbour. Or suppose the difference were even less defensible; suppose
a man had suffered from a trifling shindy with his wife. And suppose
somebody told him that the introduction of an entirely new
vacuum-cleaner would compel him to a reluctant reconciliation with his
wife. It would be found, I fancy, that human nature abhors that vacuum.
Reasonably spirited human beings will not be ordered about by bicycles
and sewing-machines; and a sane man will not be made good, let alone
bad, by the things he has himself made. I have occasionally dictated to
a typewriter, but I will not be dictated to by a typewriter, even of the
newest and most complicated mechanism; nor have I ever met a typewriter,
however complex, that attempted such a tyranny.

Yet this and nothing else is what is implied in all such talk of the
aeroplane annihilating distinctions as well as distances; and an
international aviation abolishing nationalities. This and nothing else
was really implied in one speaker's prediction that such aviation will
almost necessitate an Anglo-American friendship. Incidentally, I may
remark, it is not a true suggestion even in the practical and
materialistic sense; and the speaker's phrase refuted the speaker's
argument. He said that international relations must be more friendly
when men can get from England to America in a day. Well, men can already
get from England to Germany in a day; and the result was a mutual
invitation of which the formalities lasted for five years. Men could get
from the coast of England to the coast of France very quickly, through
nearly all the ages during which those two coasts were bristling with
arms against each other. They could get there very quickly when Nelson
went down by that Burford Inn to embark for Trafalgar; they could get
there very quickly when Napoleon sat in his tent in that camp at
Boulogne that filled England with alarums of invasion. Are these the
amiable and pacific relations whi