Page:My Airships.djvu/235

 that the general service of the navy has not yet allowed itself to pronounce on the matter. We can no longer conceal it from ourselves, however, that the hour approaches when balloons, now become military engines, will acquire, from the point of view of battle results, a great and, perhaps, decisive influence in war." As for myself, I have never made it any secret that, to my mind, the first practical use of the air-ship will be found in war, and the far-seeing Henri Rochefort, who was in the habit of coming to the aerodrome from his hotel at La Turbie, wrote a most significant editorial in this sense after I had laid before him the speed calculations of my "No. 7," then in course of building. "The day when it shall be established that a man can make his air-ship travel in a given direction and manœuvre it at will during the four hours which the young Santos demands to go from Monaco to Calvi," wrote Henri Rochefort, "there will remain little more for the nations to do than to throw down their arms. . . . "I am astonished that the capital importance of this matter has not yet been grasped by all the professionals of aerostation. To mount in a balloon that one has not constructed, and which