“It is very easy. One of these machines can carry enough dynamite, gun cotton and other destructive explosives to devastate a city of 100,000 inhabitants. It can at will, fly over any place and drop its deadly stuff precisely where it will do the most execution. It can select the palace of the king, the houses of parliament or congress, the barracks, the citadel, or the magazine, or the thickly peopled camp of a great army. It can do this with little risk, deliberately, in broad daylight, poised two or three miles above its victim out of reach of practical gunnery; but in the night it can drop death upon defenseless and unsuspecting sleepers without a moments warning. Battle ships are equally useless. A charge of dynamite dropped from a flyer being able to reduce the greatest ship to scrap iron and send it to the bottom in a moment. As personal armor became a useless encumbrance, when gunpowder was introduced, so the armoring of ships has entirely passed away in the presence of the flying machine and naval warfare is no more practicable than war or land.” “I should think,” said I, “that the “flyer” could be converted into a dangerous instrument for criminal use. What’s the reason pirates and robbers could not sail down upon a community small enough to be overpowered by them, and then sail off again with their booty to some inaccessible or solitary place?” “That has been done,” he answered, “but it is no longer easy. Whenever a fresh emergency arises in human affairs, a fresh remedy is found to meet it. It often brings its own remedy. The flyer is as great an agent in the hands of the police as it is in the hands of the criminal. As to solitary places, there are very few left on earth that are habitable, and there is not a spot that has not been seen by men, and that is not subject to police surveillance.” “Then,” said I, “they must have discovered the north pole.”