The French Airship Fleet.

New York Times 100 years ago today, September 29, 1912:
Reader Draws a Grim Picture of Its Future Significance.
To the Editor of The New York Times:
    Six years ago France trembled at the menaces of Germany, and two brothers, scorned, ridiculed, and alone, worked in a little shop in Dayton, Ohio. Yesterday the French Minister of War reviewed seventy-two aeroplanes; they filed away before him and a frenzied crowd, embodying the new strength of France and her grim answer to the German Empire.
    We wonder why France has done so much with aeroplanes and we so little; it is because she sees in them the chance to realize her dream — revenge. To her the control of the air means control of the land and sea, control of her enemy's ports and fortifications, of his railway lines and bridges, of his supply trains and magazines. Aeroplanes are not, to Frenchmen, luxuries of the rich and reckless, but the symbol of a new national consciousness and the means to achieve an old national end. They are, to modern France, the consciousness of power. The frenzy of the crowd that heard Millerand declare France must control the air was no weak and transient excitement, but the terrific sense that the machines before them meant the possibility of revenge, and that fate had given France the future, as she has given Germany for forty years, the past.
    One of the brothers is dead; does the other realize that by his patience and daring he has shifted, the European balance of power, that in his workshop in Ohio hung the destinies of two nations? Nothing in modern history, perhaps, since Napoleon crossed the Alps, equals in dramatic force and suddenness this growth in the strength of France.
            F. PEARSON.
            New York, Sept. 27, 1912.