ANTICIPATIONS
practicability of either flying-machines or submarines. Almost everyone who reads this book now will laugh at my timid little bladder-assisted aeroplanes, and yet in 1901 I was considered a very extravagant young man. "Long before 2000, and very probably before 1950, a successful aeroplane"—the boldness of it! The very stalest part of "Anticipations" is the anticipations of aerial war. But the laugh in that matter is more against me than the uninformed would believe, for even as I wrote those hesitating words, there lay in the bureau at which I wrote a pile of notes upon aviation, which a certain young soldier had confided to my keeping before he went to South Africa. He had come to me because I, at any rate, did not "think the whole blessed thing idiotic." If he came back I was to return them to him, it was his secret and he would go on with it; if he was killed I was to get them published. And now the Dunne self-balancing aeroplane defies the gales, and the other day, by Captain Dunne's kindness, I was soaring three thousand feet over the town of Sheerness.
The stuff about the "New Republic," and the attempt to define the social classes of the new age, is, I think, the most permanently valuable part of this book. The general idea of the "New Republic," the onslaught on "Democracy," the manifest dislike for such partisan and particularist things as trade unionism and nationalism are as much a part of me as the intonations of my voice or the shape of my nose. That conception of an open conspiracy of intellectuals and wilful people against existing insti-
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