In all these doings England bore but a small part. English aviators were few; and those who distinguished themselves in public competition had learned their flying in France. To speak of England's share in these amazing years of progress is to tell the history of a backward parish, and to describe its small contribution to a great world-wide movement. Yet the story, for that very reason, has an extraordinary interest. England never has been cosmopolitan. All her beginnings, even where she has led the way and set the fashion to the world, were parochial. If a change is in question, England makes trial of it, late and reluctantly, on a small scale, in her own garden. All the noisy exhortations of a thousand newspapers cannot touch her apprehension or rouse her to excitement. Next year's fashions do not much preoccupy her mind; she knows that they will come to her, in due time, from France, to be taken or rejected. When a change is something more than a fashion, and vital conditions begin to be affected, her lethargy is broken in a moment and she is awake and alert. So it was with the fashion of air-travel. The first aviator's certificate granted by a British authority was issued by the Royal Aero Club of the United Kingdom to Mr. J. T. C. Moore-Brabazon in March 1910, when already the exploits of flying men were the theme of all the world. By the 1st of November in the same year the Royal Aero Club had issued twenty-two certificates; that is to say, twenty-two pilots, some of them self-taught, and some trained in France, were licensed by the sole British authority as competent to handle a machine in the air. Eight years later, in November 1918, when the armistice put an end to the active operations of the war, the Royal Air Force was the largest and strongest of the air forces of the world. We were late in beginning, but once we had begun we were not slow. We were rich in engineering skill and in material for the struggle. Best of all, we had a body of youth fitted by temperament for the work of the air, and educated, as if by design, to take risks with a light heart--the boys of the Public Schools of England. As soon as the opportunity came they offered themselves in thousands for a work which can never be done well when it is done without zest, and which calls for some of the highest qualities of character--fearlessness, self-dependence, and swift decision. The Germans, before the war, used to speak with some contempt, perhaps with more than they felt, of the English love of sport, which they liked to think was frivolous and unworthy of a serious nation. Their forethought and organization, which was intensely, almost maniacally, serious, was defeated by what they despised; and the love of sport, or, to give it its noblest name, the chivalry, of their enemies, which they treated as a foolish relic of romance, proved itself to be the most practical thing in the world.