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Rapid communication we had had since the days of the extension of the telegraph; but it had been limited to the transmission of thoughts and of news. The coming of the aeroplanes had changed all that. These tracks on the air-maps were not mere wires thrilling with the quiverings of the electric current. Along them material things were passing continually; a constant interchange of passengers and goods was taking place hourly over the multitudinous routes. For good or ill, humanity was becoming linked together until it formed a single unit.

It is curious that all the prophetic writers of the early twentieth century concentrated their attention almost exclusively upon the racial and social reactions which might be expected to follow from this knitting of the world into a connected whole and the resultant increase of traffic between the nations over the now contracted world-spaces. They had seen the interminglings of races which began in the steamship days; and they deduced that the process would be intensified in the new era of air-transit; so that, in the end of their dreams, they saw the possibility of a World Federation stretching its rule over the whole globe and bringing with it the end of wars. None of them, strangely enough, had foreseen the real effects which this intercommunication was to bring forth.