Once or twice Lionel Eastwell had called upon me in Shaftesbury Avenue and sat beside my fire, discussing the war, the Zeppelin menace and the apparent apathy in certain quarters to deal firmly with it. At that moment the popular Press were loud in their parrot-cries that we had no adequate defence. In a sense, they voiced the public demand. But those papers which were now loudest in the denunciation of the Government were the selfsame which, before the war, had jeered at any suggested progress in aviation, and had laughed to scorn any prizes offered to aviators as encouragement in designing machines, or in flying them. The Invisible Hand was, even in those days, laid heavily upon the Press, who laughed at Zeppelins, and declared that on that night long ago, when they had been seen hovering over Sheerness, the naval witnesses of their arrival were "pulling the long bow." The Invisible Hand indeed stretched far and wide in the pre-war days. From Wick to Walmer, from Cork to Cromer, and from Donegal to Dover, the British public were assured that Zeppelins could never cross the North Sea. They were only very delicate gas-bags--some called them egg-shells--which could perhaps take up passengers in fair weather and, given continued fair weather, deposit them somewhere in safety. The Invisible Hand wrote screeds of deliberate lies and utterly bamboozled England, just as the Crowned Criminal of Germany carried on his secret and insidious policy of the Great Betrayal. Curiously enough the very organs of the Press which in 1913, when strange airships were reported over Yorkshire and the North-East coast, received the news with incredulity and amusement, were the very organs which now cried the loudest that something must be done to destroy Zeppelins. I was chatting with Teddy one afternoon in my room, and had pointed out that fact, whereupon he blew a cloud of cigarette smoke from his lips, and said: "You're quite right, my dear Claude. The armchair sceptics of 1913 were the people who have since told us that Zeppelins could kill only an occasional chicken--that Zeppelins could not reach London--that Zeppelins, if they did get to London, would never return--that Zeppelins were useless in bad weather--that Zeppelins could not survive a fall of snow--and so on." "Do you recollect how one section of the Press violently attacked another because the latter had dared to warn the country against the danger of attacks from the air?" I asked. "The purblind optimists waxed hilarious, and called it the `Scareship Campaign.'" Teddy laughed, as he stretched himself in his chair.