"I seldom, if ever, drink any intoxicant before dining, but I needed a stimulant of a sort, and some unknown tissue in me cried aloud for brandy." He hoped vaguely that the comment would lead to something more explicit, and thus bring him, without undue emphasis, so to speak, to the one topic on which he was now resolved to obtain a decisive statement from the man chiefly concerned before he faced the representatives of Scotland Yard.
But Forbes, motioning to an easy chair in a well-appointed library, and flinging himself into another, gave heed only to the one word--Brooklands.
"Did you fly ?" he asked.
"No.

I was soaking in theory, not practice." "Ah, theory.

It would, indeed, seem to be true that folded away in some convolution of our brain are the faculties of the fish and the bird.
Those latent powers are expanding daily.

The submarine has already gone far beyond the practical achievement of aerial craft.

But why, in the name of humanity, should every such development of man's almost immeasurable resources be dedicated to warlike purposes?
I am sick at heart when I hear the first question put in these days to each inventor: 'Can you enable us to kill more of our fellowmen than we can kill with existing appliances ?' Is it a new engine, a new amalgam of metals, a new explosive, a new field of electrical energy, one hears the same vulture's cry--'How many, how far, how safely can we slay ?' I regard this lust for destruction as contemptible.