As the mechanical discoveries swing forward there will always be those buoyant persons to whom the newer inventions are most welcome, contrasted with the more conservative elements who ask for quiet, and some position secure from the cyclic disturbances of change. In the next generation, any particular change has become the normal, and excites neither satisfaction nor disgust. So it has been with improved locomotion, with telegraphs and telephones, with all the outward apparatus which has set the unchanged human spirit in a world of marvel and miracle. The most obvious scientific advance which is already visible upon the horizon, is the invention of flying: which may be accepted, almost before these words are in print, as something no longer so astonishing as to excite enthusiasm or foreboding. It may exercise the profoundest influence upon the possibilities of war, of land frontiers, of divisions between contending nations. It has no real power either of infecting with disease a civilisation that is healthy, or of healing a civilisation that is sick and tired. For many years, perhaps, aerial navigation may be the sport and plaything of rich and adventurous spirits, like the first motor cars; creating occasional sensations by circling round St Paul’s Cathedral, or descending unexpectedly in other people’s back gardens. That is the stage when mankind will rejoice in the ingenuity of its inventors, heedless of the tremendous changes which such inventors must ultimately originate. Then the airship will find itself utilised for military purposes, perhaps with startling result. Then for locomotion and the transfer of people and merchandise from place to place above the recognised boundaries of ocean or territory. Finally, it will appear as a normal factor of man’s life, transfiguring the world as much as the steamship or the railway; occupied in the service of the poor as well as of the rich, under private as well as public control. It may eliminate natural boundaries which have exercised a dominant influence upon human life since human life first was. The “precious stone set in a silver sea,” with its moat defensive “against the envy of less happier lands,” may find itself suddenly helpless and vulnerable before armies dropping from the skies. War itself may become impossible or utterly destructive. Protective barriers disappear, and the ingenuities of the construction of a scientific tariff melt into thin air. Man, whether he will or no, is drawn inevitably nearer to man. He must federate, or perish in homicidal mania and blind impulse of hatred and revenge.