On the other hand, quite apart from the question of national rivalries or the old impelling causes of the madness of war, there is the further consideration of the influence of such achievements upon the delicate fabric of the body and soul of mankind. At best, any large accomplishment of flying must mean an increased hustling and speeding up of human life; more hurry, more bustle, more breathlessness, more triumphant supremacy of material things. In all our mechanical ingenuities we have constructed masters for us, rather than servants; being compelled, immediately such ingenuities have found fruit in invention, to adjust our lives to the new conditions which these, and not we ourselves, henceforth dictate and impose. We are compelled, for example, to avail ourselves of the telegraph and the telephone; we are driven to the express train, the motor omnibus, the various expedients which are adapted to acceleration, rather than to happiness. If we do not adjust our lives to such accelerations, we are swept aside or trodden under by the crowds which press behind; like those who fail in the daily leap for the Brooklyn cars at New York, and are swept aside or trodden under almost unheeded. Has all this violence and tumult made life richer, fairer, more desirable for the children of men? Or is man losing in the mere blind effort of acceleration some of those experiences which once transfigured and glorified his little span of days? “Can you really turn a ray of light by magnetism?” shouted Carlyle scornfully. “And if you can, what should I care?” Matthew Arnold complained that the modern Englishman “thinks it the highest pitch of development and civilisation when his letters are carried twelve times a day from Islington to Camberwell and from Camberwell to Islington, and when railway trains run between them every quarter of an hour. He thinks it nothing that the trains only carry him from an illiberal dismal life at Camberwell to an illiberal dismal life at Islington, and the letters only tell him that such is the life there.” Airships journeying daily from Paris to Pekin might excite exultation in a humanity which has emulated the exploits of Icarus, without exciting, like Icarus, the wrath of the jealous gods. Of what profit if they be found merely to transfer to Paris an existence which has become intolerable at Pekin, and to Pekin an existence which has become intolerable at Paris? It is a remarkable fact in the history of European development, that all the recent success of scientific and mechanical invention has been accompanied by an ever profounder questioning of the advantage of it all; so that to-day, when we seem on the verge of such discoveries as would have made our ancestors shout for joy in the mere triumph of creative energy, great writers are inquiring, with more bitterness and uncertainty than ever before, whether a verdict of bankruptcy has not been passed upon the whole of this complicated and baffled society. Mr.