_ are only the first pigmy essays of the aeronaut. It is
clear that to be effective, capable of carrying guns and comparatively
insensitive to perforation by shot and shell, these things will have to
be very much larger and as costly, perhaps, as a first-class cruiser.
Imagine such monsters of the air, and wild financial panic below!

Here, then, are two associated possibilities with which to modify our
expectation of an America advancing steadily on the road to an organised
civilisation, of New York rebuilding herself in marble, spreading like a
garden city over New Jersey and Long Island and New York State, becoming
a new and greater Venice, queen of the earth.

Perhaps, after all, the twentieth century isn't going to be so
prosperous as the nineteenth. Perhaps, instead of going resistlessly
onward, we are going to have a set-back. Perhaps we are going to be put
back to learn over again under simpler conditions some of those
necessary fundamental lessons our race has learnt as yet insufficiently
well--honesty and brotherhood, social collectivism, and the need of some
common peace-preserving council for the whole world.

THE IDEAL CITIZEN

Our conceptions of what a good citizen should be are all at sixes and
sevens. No two people will be found to agree in every particular of such
an ideal, and the extreme divergences upon what is necessary, what is
permissible, what is unforgivable in him, will span nearly the whole
range of human possibility and conduct. As a consequence, we bring up
our children in a mist of vague intimations, in a confusion of warring
voices, perplexed as to what they must do, uncertain as to what they may
do, doomed to lives of compromise and fluctuating and inoperative
opinion. Ideals and suggestions come and go before their eyes like
figures in a fog. The commonest pattern, perhaps--the commonest pattern
certainly in Sunday schools and edifying books, and on all those places
and occasions when morality is sought as an end--is a clean and
able-bodied person, truthful to the extent that he does not tell lies,
temperate so far as abstinence is concerned, honest without pedantry,
and active in his own affairs, steadfastly law-abiding and respectful to
custom and usage, though aloof from the tumult of politics, brave but
not adventurous, punctual in some form of religious exercise, devoted to
his wife and children, and kind without extravagance to all men.
Everyone feels that this is not en