tion to labor organizations formed for purposes recognized by the Trade Union Acts.

It will be urged of course, that this gradual widening of State control is another name for the advent of the Socialistic state. The newspapers have made much play of late with the bogey of Socialism. But how do they like the alternative? If individuals are to fight out their own battles whilst the State looks on, what is to prevent the enormous dislocation of public business and interference with public comfort involved in these far-spreading industrial disputes? Some sort of Governmental action is inevitably called for, call it Socialism if you will. Have not the newspapers been crying out on all hands for State interference, to coerce the malcontents, to "protect the loyal workers," to get paterfamilias his morning paper and his customary suburban train? Given State interference, you can have any kind you like from autocracy to Socialism. At one end of the scale you can have the dictatorship which proclaims martial law and mows down malcontents with maxim guns; at the other end you have the government "broad-based upon the people's will," which it is the fashion nowadays to call Socialistic. But both are government. The only question is whether you are going to govern in the interests of the one, or the few, or the many. Now that the many have learned their power and how to use it, it looks as if government in the interests of the few, or even of the middle classes, was no longer within the sphere of practical politics.

Granted, then, the necessity of some degree of Government intervention in labor disputes when they reach a certain degree of intensity, there remains the question of how to make that intervention as little irritating to either party and as little coercive as may be. Arbitration, whether compulsory

or

voluntary, has in the past proved disappointing. It is distrusted by the workmen, who think that too often it has proceeded on the "heads I win, tails you lose" principle. It is distrusted by the employers, who allege that in too many instances, whether with or without the sanction of their unions, employees bound to observe certain terms have struck work again without notice and contrary to the award. On the whole, Conciliation Boards seem to meet with more favor, both because they can take action at an earlier stage in the dispute, and because they can be made more or less permanent institutions in important industries. The Royal Commission on Labor of 1891, the appointment of which was an indirect result of the Dock Strike, expressed itself somewhat strongly in favor of the principle, which was strikingly illustrated during the years when the Commission was sitting by the signal success of the Conference presided over by Lord Rosebery in terminating the great mining strike of 1893. Liberal Administration in power when the Labor Commission's Report was laid before Parliament in 1894, proceeded to create a special Labor Department of the Board of Trade; but this institution fell under the influence of that little doctrinaire group of Liberals, lately satirized by Mr. H. G. Wells, who think that the world can be ruled by phrases and statistics when men and women are crying for bread and air. The result was not unnaturally disappointing. In 1896 the principle of intervention received definite legal sanction by the passing of the Conciliation Act, which empowers the Board of Trade, "where a difference exists or is apprehended between any employer, or any class of employers, and workmen, or between different classes of workmen," to hold an inquiry, or endeavor to arrange a meeting, and on the appplication of either

The

party to appoint a Conciliator or Board of Conciliation. On the application of both parties the Board of Trade may appoint an arbitrator.

It is obvious that the success of such a system depends largely on the personal equation. No machinery in the world, least of all statistic-collecting officialdom, can do much good when matters have come to a crisis, or even when a prolonged process of pinpricks have brought about the overwrought state of nerves which explodes in such sudden strikes for apparently trivial causes as affected the railway world throughout last year. It is not enough to have a permanent official; indeed, it is undesirable to leave such a delicate task to any official. Who have been the successful conciliators? Men of the world, men of affairs, men especially like Lord Rosebery and Mr. Lloyd George, with the orator's gift and the orator's quick sympathy with The Fortnightly Review.

his audience. Is it not time to inIclude in the Cabinet a Minister of Labor, someone who can relieve the President of the Board of Trade of some part of his multifarious duties, take over his Labor Department, and breathe fresh life into it, control the newly-founded Labor Exchanges, grapple with the great problem of unemployment, and so keep in touch with the industrial world that he can speak that word in season to one or both of the parties in any industry which shows signs of coming trouble? He would need to be not the least gifted member of the Cabinet. Tact and sympathy would have to be added to knowledge; he must know men as well as know how to rule them. Will the Government take the matter into their consideration, and will the Chancellor of the Exchequer prove his devotion to the cause of the people by consenting to take the newly-created portfolio?

nine tons six thousand feet above the earth.

Then had followed the time of the first trials. Awakened two or three hours before the gray autumnal dawn, we had waited more or less patiently up to the knees in dripping grass for the wind to fall or the fog to lift. At last, after days of patience, four trial flights had been accomplished; the airship had found herself, like the steamer of Mr. Kipling's story, and proved herself air-worthy; her designer, M. Julliot, had declared himself satisfied; and on the next favorable day she was to make her first real voyage straight from her shed at Moisson (near Mantes), across 120 miles of land and 80 miles of sea, to the Army Balloon Factory, South Farnborough.

A single preoccupation possessed the little party which ate and slept at the hotel of the Maison Rouge, and that preoccupation was the weather. When we had done justice to the excellent food our hostess provided to console us for our daily disappointment, over the good red wine, Louis Capazza, our pilot, would tell us stories of the air, while a French naval lieutenant, who was there to swing our compass, would cap them with legends of the sea or our landlord would beguile the time with improbable tales of the motorraces in which he had taken part. But ever and anon one or the other of us would rise from his seat and, halfashamed of his persistence, go out into the night to see how the clouds were driving and to ask the village weather prophet, the keeper of the toll-bridge across the Seine, the prospects for the

morrow.

At

All the preparations for our voyage were completed. A British destroyer was waiting off the coast to convoy us across the Channel, and all day and all night we were receiving by telegraph and telephone weather reports from the men on the French and English coasts in charge of the captive balloons which were to mark our course. two in the morning the first telegram of the day would arrive, and after that sleep was banished. We all dressed and hastened to the shed with sleep still heavy upon us, and there, each squatting on a ballast-bag, held solemn conclave as to the possibility of starting.

On these occasions Capazza was never happy if he was not out in the plain watching the wire cable which held a captive balloon invisible in the darkness above and which, swaying this way or that, marked every vagary of the wind. He is the finest type of aëronaut, and than him no one has risked his life more freely and more cheerfully in the cause of aëronautical

science. With his gray Vandyke beard and waving white hair he recalls the pictures of the Elizabethan sea-captains, and his eyes, which experience has gifted with an uncanny power of vision, would have met even Drake's scowl without flinching. He has descended in a parachute from the height of Mont Blanc, and trusted himself in a free balloon to the wind's caprice with all the Mediterranean before him, landing by a miracle on his native Corsica; but no danger has ever deprived him of his rare simplicity and love of all things beautiful. He may be silent and moody before a flight, but when everyone is chafing and tempers are all on edge he will be placidly picking wild flowers in the fields near the shed of his airship, and will find strange content in the suggestion of an opera played by a decrepit gramophone. dash of bravado, as characteristic of the Southern races to-day as it was of the Elizabethan adventurer, mingles with his disconcerting directness of manner and adds the finishing touch to his picturesque figure.

A

If Capazza represents the adventurous spirit of the airman, Henri Julliot is the incarnation of his essential virtue, a smiling and indomitable patience. Hours before morning broke he would be sitting on a ballast-bag in the shed, which by the fitful light of two or three small electric lamps loomed huge and mysterious, with its vaulted roof borne up by complicated wooden columns that in the play of light and shadow seemed the carved pillars of a Gothic cathedral. Up aloft the great monster which his genius had created filled the roof, swaying uneasily to and fro as the men made all ready in the car. From time to time the religious silence would be broken by a sharp command or the clang of a hammer, while mysterious figures, the villagers of Moisson, who had come a hundred strong to take the airship from her shed, gathered in

pers.

When, after days of waiting, nerves were strained to breaking-point, and the crew eager for the journey would inquire sarcastically whether there was still too little wind, Julliot would reply cheerfully, "If it is not to-day, it will be to-morrow," and would take us down to watch the opening of the great canvas door. As it was drawn aside, the first gray morning light made its way into the shed; the tapering gasbag, with its 10,000 cubic mètres of gas straining wildly upwards, only restrained by countless bags of sand, seemed to be balanced on the sharp landing-point of the car, for all the world like a liner of some 6000 tons displacement turned up side down with her vast keel balanced on her funnel.

When we had abandoned hope, the day of our departure came. At 2 A.M. a telegram from the French coast told us that a violent easterly gale was blowing, and that it was impossible to put up the captive balloon; from Brighton the same tale. As the morning wore on we heard that the wind, though still strong, appeared to be abating. Julliot and Capazza were determined to start if it was possible; Julliot indeed seemed to delight in the idea of his airship wrestling with a strong cross-wind. At the shed it was a dead calm, and a thick mist, the aëronaut's worst foe, lay heavy over the country-side. We motored up to the hills behind the Seine, but even on their summit it was impossible to see fifty yards ahead. At 9 A.M. the attempt seemed hopeless, and 10 A.M. was the latest hour at which we could start if we were to allow for accidents and be sure of reaching Farnborough before nightfall. It would have been madness to attempt to find our way to the coast over a sea of mist.

We had had nothing to eat that morning, and as we motored down to

seemed to have arrived. Steaming coffee and long French rolls had just made their appearance when a shout from outside summoned us. As if by a miracle the mist had suddenly vanished and left a sunny autumn morning; not a moment was to be lost. With a rush each of us seized our impedimenta-oilskins, maps, Thermos flasks, field-glasses, and the like; breakfast was forgotten, though, thanks to a happy inspiration. I left the hotel brandishing a long French roll.

Eight, all told, we rushed wildly across the plain to the airship and scrambled, hot and panting, up the ladder to our places in the car. Ballastbags were passed up and down until the weight of the dirigible and the air that she displaced were practically equal. "We must be light," said Capazza, "so as to rise quickly and pass well above the hills." More bags of sand were handed down, and each of us threw overboard the metal seat which had been intended for our comfort, but which merely occupied valuable space. Then came the order "Lâchez tout"; the men below loosed their hold on the ropes, and the earth began to fall away miraculously from beneath our feet. The airship was rising quietly and majestically, but to us on board she semed motionless; without a moment of transition we had passed from a world of haste and worry to a world of absolute peace. After the strain of waiting and the final rush a gentle drowsiness crept over me, and I only longed to stretch myself out lazily to enjoy to the full the placid content of being one with the subtle element of the air and of sharing for a time the superiority of the birds over our grosser humanity. Men were running and cheering on the plain, but all the turmoil below was infinitely distant, infinitely unimportant. One of the motors was running,

though not yet geared up to the propellers, and as it throbbed, anxious to be about its work, its even hum sounded as peaceful as the droning of a bumble-bee on a hot summer day, while the sun shone bright on the yellow monster above that was bearing us towards the sky.

Just a fortnight before, after twentyfour hours of weary travelling, I had leaned out of the carriage-window as the clanking train ran into a little Italian station. A little of the peace of Italy found its way into the noisy box in which we had been cooped all day. As the engine drew up, the village postman, with his bag and parcels, lazily sat down upon the footboard of the carriage, as though we had come all the many miles from Paris just to provide him with a seat. Two porters lounging against the wall were talking idly to a dark-eyed girl whose kerchief shone bright scarlet in the evening sunlight. The little campo santo, the village cemetery, built of brick baked from the rich red soil that lavishes prosperity without undue toil on the native of the Lombard plain, stood beside the station, guarded by rows of dark motionless poplars, sharp outlined against the blue Southern sky; with its warm red tints and the fresh green of the shrubs and grass that grew among the graves, it seemed the home of rest and tranquillity. The peace of that Italian evening was of the same quality as the peace which stole over me as we sought the upper air beyond the kingdom of the birds, and in a flash the whole scene passed once again before my eyes.

There was a little breeze from the E.S.E., and as we rose the great ship drifted slowly towards the shed. The tranquillity which I was enjoying was lost on Capazza and Léon, his assistant, who were hard at work-Capazza preparing his maps for the voyage and keeping a watchful eye on the barome

ter that told our altitude and on the manometer that registered the pressure of gas in the envelope, while Léon tilted up a great sack of sand so that its contents ran down the ballast funnel, steadily lightening us. Then on a word from Capazza he sprang at one of the cords that open the gas-valves and, throwing his weight upon it, let a few cubic metres of gas escape with a roar far away in the stern; for the autumn sun was warming the envelope, and the pressure of the hydrogen in the balloon was growing too high. To my inexperienced eye it seemed for a few seconds that we were about to drift into the roof of the shed some 80 feet from the ground, but we were, as the barometer showed, already 100 feet above it. Léon turned for a second from the wheel that controls the horizontal planes, holding up two fingers, and at once one of the mechanics in the stern picked up two of the scores of cans of petrol that we were carrying as ballast and dropped them overboard, hesitating a second to find a safe place in the crowd below.

A shrill blast of a whistle and a signal from Capazza, and the propellers were started. With a roar, first the stern then the bow motor, each with its 130 H.P., was geared up, and the propellers began to revolve faster and faster. The airship forged slowly ahead and Capazza swung round his wheel, glancing back to see that the rudder far away above and behind us, with the Union Jack and Tricolor flying just beneath it, had answered truly. Due north-east and straight for Farnborough, 197 miles away as the crow flies, we headed. Léon meantime, mounted on two sacks of ballast so as to have a clear view ahead, was bringing the horizontal planes into play and forcing us up against the air like an aëroplane, turning from time to time to hold up two fingers as a sign to the mechanics to lighten us of two