Free press., 1906-09-29
MAN FLIGHT NEXT.
Continued from Page y

waste the vanQuished country with
great arrows of explosive shot down
| from a height of thousands of feet-ten
thousand times more horrible than now
war will be- Some persons hold that
the flying machine will make war i'm
possible through the new horrors it will
introduce. But this presupposes that
with its advent mans nature will some
how be miraculously purified of the
fighting taint ''in the twinkling of an
eye"
When man flies he will escape the heat
of the city overnight by ascending to
well-defined "anchorages" above the
scenes of daily toll, and as the colony
of air yachts "foat" as a bird seems to
float, the wireless telephone will carry
to the occupants of each yacht" the
jokes and songs of the stage folk in the
amusement boat"
Up, up into the pure, microbeless,
-dustless air the sick and suffering will
be carried and nursed back to health in
private air sanatoria and state and mil
nicipal air hospitals. (See Kipling' S
with the Night Mail" And go to the
same wonderfully realistic story for a
description of the air lanes, akin to the
ocean lanes of to-day; lanes one above
another-one at so many thousand feet
for the mail packets, another for hos
pital boats, a third for freighters, still
another for 'round-the-world expresses,
and so on.)
When man flies, good-by to the rail-
road for long-distance travelling, and
| happy thought-to the rebate contro-
versy. Good-by, too, to the present day,
often false, weather prognosticator. Fly
ing, man will of necessity, both for per-
feet flight and other obvious reasons,
come into possession of a well-nigh
complete meteorology. Then agriculture
all industry-will be transformed.
Between midnight and dawn the
morning newspapers of New York will
be whirled to Chicago, and vice versa J;
and New York business man will step
into the San Francisco express at the
close of the business hours one day and
be set down on a landing stage at the
! Golden Gate next morning, before bust
ness hours, after leisurely flight (mark
the words y across the continent.
When man flies, will the customs off
cials be hard put to it to circumvent the
smuggler? How far up in the air over
it will a nation have jurisdiction? A
distance corresponding to the three
league jurisdiction on the sea, or as far
up as a cannon can shoot, as suggested
by the German savants, who want to
have this and other minor questions set
tied against the day of the flying ma
chimes arrival.
And suppose, suppose nation should
succeed in buying up the secret of man
flight, and succeed, also, in sedu1ously
guarding it for its own uses-what
then?
A one nation world from Pole to
Polei
HE who shall make himself master of
the sea is destined to become master
of the land" truthfully wrote Theni-
stocles long, long ago. And those of us
who are looking forward to the advent OF
air navigation as a matter of course $50
far along have we advanced towards ac-
tual flight) can add in equal truthful
ness: "And he who shall make himself
master of the air, and shall hold the
secret thereof, will become master OF
both"
Revolution, life itself, we will not be-
gin even to dream their real meaning
until we hyl