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This is a purely personal matter, and may therefore annoy people who dislike reading narratives told by a journalist about himself; but the experience related is so horrificent that it seems worth while putting it on paper.

Presumably it was the effect of mental indigestion caused by reading very nearly all last week's papers in search of something remotely resembling authentic news of the doings of Naval and Military aviators. What with News Agency reports, stories by "Special Correspondents" very much at the back of the front, excerpts from the "Tijd," and the "Retch," and the "Tageblatt," and the "Corriere della Sierra," and the "Pesthi Hirlap," and "L'Homme Embusqué," and a few other journals with comic names, and a course of articles by "experts" on the naval and military and aeronautical situations, one is a trifle apt to get one's ideas mixed, and consequently one evening, after some hours of fine confused reading, the person who habitu. ally fills these front pages of THE AEROPLANE fell asleep and dreamed a fearsome dream.

When he woke up it was apparently some years hence, and the paper in his hand bore that date, or thereabouts. As is customary in dreams, his new circumstances did not surprise him, and, as a good little journalist should, he set to work to bring his ideas up to date. It seemed that the war was still going on, but that great changes had taken place in this country. By inference, from a reference to some happening of a few years previously, it appeared that, driven to desperation by the Censorship, the great newspaper proprietors had buried their individual quarrels with one another and had apparently stirred up a tumult of the people which had resulted in a raid on the Press Bureau in which the whole staff of Censors, AssistantCensors, Deputy-Assistant-Censors, right down to the Temporary-Acting-Sub-Assistant-Deputy-Censors, had been completely wiped out. It was said that some of them had so little heart in their work that they actually held out their hands in the "Enquiry Office" and were led peacefully away, while the Arch-Censor escaped with his life only disguised as "5 Miles of Paper for the 'Daily Terror' on a motor lorry, thanks to a tender-hearted newspaper proprietor who remembered his blameless life before the war.

Following on this terrible upheaval it seemed that a thoroughly democratic Government had managed somehow to worm its way into power. Aristocrats like Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Churchill, autocrats like Mr. Lloyd George, and two persons vaguely alluded to as "K. of K." and "Jacky of the Fish Pond," who, one gathered, had had something to do with the National Defence Forces, were deprived of their power, and it appeared that they all, with their chief supporters, had emigrated to the United States as being the only country which really appreciated people who were big men in their own particular lines of business. There, apparently, they had secured financial backing and had established an Anglo-Saxon Naval and Military Trust, which had succeeded in carrying a Universal Service Bill through Congress, and the Senate, and Tammany Hall, and were rapidly raising a Navy and an Army of forty million men with really adequate equip

ment of ships, guns, mechanical transport, and aircraft, which would render the two Continents of America absolutely proof against European or Asiatic invasion, and make it a real white man's country.

Their successors in this country, headed by one Ramsay MacHaggis, a neutralised Scotsman, had at first decided on a "Peace at Any Price" programme, deciding to declare that England would fight no more, but would hand over Ireland to Austro-Hungary and Scotland to Germany, so that England might for once enjoy Home Rule without Celtic interference. Though this programme certainly appealed to a section of the people, a still more powerful section objected.

The newspaper proprietors pointed out that all they really wanted was to abolish the Censor, for when once that was done they could publish any stories they chose, and so could check or stimulate recruiting as the exigencies of the Press demanded. Germany, Austria, France, and European Russia being fought nearly to a standstill, England was capturing all the World's trade left over after the American factories were full of orders, and so the advertisements were coming back. People in this country who had made millions out of armament contracts were buying extravagant motor cars, and jewels, and furs, and exotic lap-dogs, and so retail trade was booming. At the same time people had acquired the "War News Habit" so virulently that war news, and plenty of it, was just as necessary to the circulation departments of the papers as advertisements were to the financial departments. Consequently the newspaper proprietors, through whose efforts all the strong men in the political classes had been removed, decided that the war must go on.

In carrying out this decision they found powerful supporters in Cinema financial circles, who found that "faked" war pictures no longer satisfied their hypercritical supporters. A rumour that a film was faked was enough to ensure the wrecking of even the most luxurious "Palace," unless heavily guarded by special constables off duty, whose presence had to be secured by free season-tickets for the "movies," and finally it became hopeless to try and "release" any film of the war which had not a guaranteed percentage of genuine corpses in it. The public taste for gore-somebody else's at a safe distance, of course-became as great and as fastidious as that of the populace during the latter days of the Roman Empire. Therefore, it was obviously in the Cinema interests that the war should continue, sufficiently vigorously to sustain public interest, but not on so large a scale as to threaten a serious decrease of population, which would have meant a falling off in newspaper circulation and in the patronage of Cinemas, owing to the necessity for calling out large numbers of recruits.

The popular heroes of the "legitimate" stage and of the Cinemas found their usual vocations gone, but the music-halls seemed to rub along fairly well by engaging newspaper heroes to recite stirring poems when they came home on leave. Some of them even sang war-songs, specially composed by erstwhile rag-time manufacturers, but these chiefly served to stimulate the consumption of cocoa products at the bars of the