At about the time that the German War Lord, resplendent in the eagle-crowned helmet and silver cuirass of the Guard Cuirassiers, was haranguing in sonorous phrases the punitive expedition which was about to depart for China, two young mechanics in greasy overalls were at work in an obscure machine-shop in an Ohio city on a strange invention which was destined to prove a far more potent weapon than the Kaiser’s boasted “shining sword.” Now it is certain that at this period the All Highest had never heard of these young mechanics, and though they, of course, had heard of him, I imagine that to the accounts of his spectacular doings which appeared almost daily in the newspapers they paid about as much attention as they did to the gaudy lithographs on the local bill-boards which heralded the annual visit of the circus. Yet, could William of Hohenzollern have looked a dozen years into the future, he would have seen that these two silent, earnest, unassuming brothers from the Middle Western town were destined to have a profounder effect on the future of the great empire which he ruled, and, indeed, on the history of the world, than he and all the princes, soldiers, and statesmen who surrounded him. Notwithstanding the jibes and forebodings of the professional critics, the ponderous sarcasms of senators and congressmen, and the sensational stories of failure which have appeared in the press, there are few more brilliant chapters in our national history than the story of the airplane. Do you realize, I wonder, that the airplane is the development of barely a decade? Had a life-insurance company, ten years ago, learned that one of its policy-holders was planning to take a ride in a “flying-machine,” it would promptly have cancelled his policy. Yet to-day planes carrying the air-post between the cities of the Eastern seaboard go booming down the air-lanes as regularly as express-trains and without attracting much more attention.