Peace and War in the Air

Abstract

IT is one of the most tragic facts in the recent development of science that the conquest of the air, which on all grounds should have worked towards the unification of the world and the harmony of mankind, has actually become one of our most threatening dangers. No branch of science is more completely international in its history than aeronautics. Oayley, Lilienthal, the Wrights and Bleriot are a few names out of hundreds, all belonging to different nations, all having contributed something essential to what should be a common good. The air itself is obviously international, having a common constitution, enveloping and moving over us all, and having no possible fixed boundaries or divisions. Nothing, except the sunlight and rays from space, seems so clearly devised by Nature to keep us all together. Yet this heaven-sent unifier is finding in practice almost every possible man-made obstacle to the carrying out of its proper work. Men have used it almost from the first for what is simply murder, the killing, by the easiest wholesale way, of non-combatants-women and children-in the course of war. Moreover, though this practice is solemnly banned at international conferences and by the League of Nations, all the nations go on making their fighting planes so that they may do their destructive work more and more expeditiously. Now it is said that, even in the sphere of civil aviation, so many difficulties are put in the way of co-operation that an international authority is out of the question. In spite of the progress of science, the League of Nations and the extreme economic needs of the world, it is being made more difficult to secure a free passage through the air than free passage at sea.