The Chinese are more conscious than the English-speaking peoples of deficient knowledge, and of the need of new inspiration. Our phase is, comparatively, a phase of self-satisfaction. The Chinese will know what we think, and know long before we have realised how much we have to learn from them, and what a wholesome thing it is for us to get their point of view. For Chinese schools multiply and teaching spreads, and where there are schools and teaching there the future grows. XXXV AIR ARMAMENT: THE SUPREMACY OF QUALITY 3.5.24 Bankrupt France and out-of-work England are developing a sort of armament race in air equipment. It has not quite the vigour of the old naval armament race; it is not so expensive, and the chances for financial and industrial loot are less. But it goes on, and at present, on paper at least, France leads handsomely. On paper France is ascendant over Britain in the air, capable of inflicting vast injuries, while sustaining small reprisals, and the matter is one of great concern to many anxious souls. They have visions of London stark and stiff and twisted under poison gas and all the British ports and docks destroyed. The vagueness of our knowledge does on the whole enhance our terrors. But it is well to remember that our knowledge _is_ vague. It is particularly vague about the things that aeroplanes can carry and drop. Chemists and science students generally find an innocent pleasure in inventing wonderful rays, explosives, and lethal gases for the benefit of the ingenuous newspaper man. They invent them rather than make them. In practice the normal limitations and insufficiencies of this earthly life apply with peculiar force to explosives and lethal gases. Only in the world of scientific romance can they be made out of nothing and instantaneously. In this sordid world of everyday they demand ingredients that are difficult and expensive to produce and limited in amount, and they require apparatus and skill and often considerable courage for their preparation. And in order to produce any serious effect on an enemy they must be delivered in huge consignments upon that enemy, and that requires a large number of aeroplanes of sufficient size to carry bulky material. Mr. Galsworthy was recently writing to the _Times_ in grave alarm about the exposure of Britain to French air attack. He saw all her ports destroyed, no wharf for any food ship, England starved. I doubt if he had ever attempted to figure out how many tons of high explosive--allowing for the inevitable misses--would have to be conveyed from France to Southampton, for example, to smash up that one port alone to any decisive extent.