The news that Harry Hawker and his navigator Grieve, the daring pair who tried to be the first to cross the Atlantic by airplane, are safe again on English soil and were royally feted on their arrival last night in London cannot fail to appeal to the American imagination as much as to the British. A man who, unlike our more cautious United States Navy filers, "took all the chances" in a daredevil attempt to do what many air-men considered next to impossible, impressed American and British sportsmanship to the same high degree. From the moment of Hawker's sensational get-away, when he dropped with his landing-gear practically all his chances of alighting safely on land, Americans were "rooting" for him, rather than the more cautiously scientific American pilots. Then he was lost for a week, and General Sir Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout Movement, was deeply affected last week as he told a New York audience that Americans seemed to feel that loss,--the loss of a thorough sport,--almost more than Englishmen themselves.

Hawker has contributed much toward world-progress in aviation; in his next attempt he will probably contribute more. But perhaps his greatest service has been purely unintentional. He has made two great kindred nations feel keenly how like they are, one to the other, in their basic love of good sportsmanship. He has brought Britain and America closer, perhaps, than ever before, thus imparting even more life and substance to the cordial and brotherly words uttered by President Wilson in London and Manchester last December.