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Aviation History
1917
1917 - 0102.PDF
FEBRUARY I, 1917. will have to be done a vast amount of the same sort of work. After all, it does require more effort of the imagination to believe that travel by aeroplane is really as safe as by car, besides having the added merit of far greater speed and freedom. It is not enough to merely assert that this is the case in order to carry conviction. But the war has helped to advance the cause in a manner and to an extent which we shall only begin to realise when peace comes again. It has brought into the movement many thousands who would never have been identified with it otherwise. Every one of those recruits will be a missionary for the great cause of aviation after the war, and thus the conversion of the layman will be far and away easier and more rapid than otherwise it would have been. We do not want to indulge in far-fetched dreams of the future, but we can visualise within the next decade a movement that will have outgrown the most sanguine expectations of the present. There is no reason why Lord Montagu's ideal of regular aeroplane services between India and England should not have materialised into commonplace fact by then. We shall have regular Transatlantic aerial services. Internally, we shall have vast numbers of aircraft employed on all sorts of public services—passenger, postal, and commercial. The number of private machines in use will have become legion—it will be no more extraordinary to own an aeroplane than to possess a car. We doubt not that some of our readers will smile at these prophecies. The answer to that is : regard what has happened in the last decade. With that as a text, is it extravagant to expect anything less than we have outlined ? After a careful examination of the Propose of the Director of National Service, we cannot say that we are extremely enamoured of them. We are told that it is necessary to get men away from the non-essential trades and into those that are essential. By essential we understand trades that are directly or at least indirectly related to the production of munitions or other material of war. If people are not willing to volunteer from those non-essential trades, then we are point-blank informed that industrial conscription is to be the resort. To begin with, we do not believe that there are large numbers of men employed in the " non-essential " trades who would be of very much use in the " essential " ones without a longer or shorter period of training to fit them for their new spheres of work. Another point is that no two people are likely to agree upon a definition of what really constitutes a " non-essential " trade. As a matter of fact, we should hesitate to pronounce any trade non-essential, inasmuch—and the present record loam is an object-lesson in this connection—as we require money and yet more money to carry the war to a victorious end, and if we are going to cripple some and close down others of the trades that are providing a very large proportion of the sinews of war, then, without the very greatest judgment and discretion is used, we are simply killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Before we proceed to the extremity of the kind of industrial conscription that is connoted by the threat to "comb out " the non-essential trades, we cannot avoid thinking that the Government would do well to think over a thorough sift of the Army itself. In the days when voluntary recruiting was the vogue, in addition to hordes of hopelessly useless men as soldiers, many many thousands of skilled woikers found their way into the ranks. Some proportion of the latter have been released for work in the munition factories, but there still remain large numbers of these men who would be worth much more to the State in the factories at home than they are behind the lines in France. Under the compulsory system of military service the waste of man-power has been appalling. Every day cases come to light in which men who are useful civilians are drafted into the rank> to make bad soldiers. This is the worst kind of economy for the State, inasmuch as it transforms the man who is of use to the community either as a workei or as a tax-payer into one who is a sheer and utterh useless burden. For this the tribunals are very largely to blame, though the central authorities cannot altogether be absolved. On the part of the lattei there seems to be too much of a prevailing idea that the nation's resources are in the nature of a bottom- less reservoir which is akin to the widow's cruse of oil. On the contrary, there is a distinct limit to our resources, and there is no apparent indication that this is recognised by the Government. The fact of the matter is that we are running decentralisation to death. We have created almost numberless departments, each with a Controller of Something or Other at its head. Quite naturally, each controllei is out to get the best results for his department, and < it is equally natural that, with the best intentions in the world, he tries for those results without too much thought for the effects produced thereby on other ~ departments. We have the Army, the Navy, the Ministry of Munitions, the Food Controller, the Controller of National Service, all competing against ^ each other in the labour market, with the consequence that the competition between the Army and the Navy for aeroplanes, which we have so often deplored, becomes a thing of little consequence in comparison. We have never liked the extension of the "Control" ~ system, and the more we see of it the less we are inclined to modify our dislike. It is not that we object to being controlled, but we do object to the appalling waste of resources the system has produced. We are .. supposed to have a " Business Government " now, V and we do submit to that Government that the present wastefulness of the whole system is not " business." -, •2^ »> •*• ''S'-' At the end of November last the com- Ftae rnittee of the Society of British Aircraft Response. Constructors appealed to the aircraft industry for support for the Air Services Winter Comforts Fund. In response to this appeal no less a sum than £6,785, of which details appear elsewhere in this issue of " FLIGHT," has been received, and has been divided in the rough proportions of two-thirds to the R.F.C. and one-third to the R.N.A.S. We congratulate Lady Henderson and Mrs. Murray Sueter on the splendid accession to the funds of the organisation in which they have so ably interested themselves since the first winter of the war. We doubt not that they will be able to make the best possible use of the money, and of more when it is forthcoming. So far as concerns this last, we under- stand that although this money has been handed over to the fund, the latter is by no means closed, so that if any of those who may not have had their attention called to the list feel inclined to contribute to so deserving a cause, there is no reason in the world why they should not do so. 102
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