The moral I draw here to-day is to repeat exactly what I maintained upon the British Civil Air Transport Commission in 1918. “Private enterprise” cannot run successful European air services. Moreover, it is impossible to control the air services of Europe on nationalist lines. You cannot have nearly forty sovereign countries each trying to wreck the air service of the other thirty-nine. Europe must be one area for air transport under one control, or there can be nothing but a few ferry services in operation. One comprehensive European air trust, with hundreds and presently thousands of aeroplanes in daily flight and two or three in reserve and under over-haul for every one in the air, would have in the end an enormously profitable organisation. But Europe to-day is as morally incapable of producing such an organisation as Central Africa. These risky trips in dud machines and these flowery prospectuses of defective services are as much organised public flying as this generation is likely to see in Europe. VII WILL GERMANY BREAK INTO PIECES? 3.11.23 Will Germany break into pieces and become a group of divergent and mutually hostile States? To some readers this will seem to be an entirely useless question. They will declare that the thing is happening. Germany is breaking up visibly, they will say. Germany has attempted a democratic republic and failed. The daily news is kaleidoscopic. It varies with the day and the political bias of one’s paper. Sometimes Germany is breaking in this way and sometimes in that. But few people seem to have much faith in the final emergence of a united Germany from this sea of disaster and misery in Central Europe. Perhaps I believe too much in the things of the mind and imagination, in language and writing and literature as a link and a sustaining power in human affairs, but I do not share this belief in the break-up of Germany. I believe she will keep together as Russian-speaking Russia has kept together, and become again a great nation and a great people playing a leading part in the world’s destinies.