Second: air trains. This means a leading airplane towing behind it several winged, engineless freight cars, at the cost of only a trifling increase in the outlay for gasoline, while saving the price of engines

and spare parts, which make up the greater part of the principal expenditure of the airline companies.

The Allies used this method when they invaded Italy from the African mainland in the Second World War, aiming thereby to transport the greatest possible number of soldiers in the shortest time and at the least cost — and it succeeded brilliantly. The idea was taken from German experiments carried out before the war between the Berlin airport and a number of other semi-airports. Why, then, should we not profit from this paying operation and link Lebanon with the rest of the neighboring countries by these air trains?

Picture a Douglas No. 4 airplane taking off from Beirut, towing behind it two winged, engineless freight cars, the first carrying Lebanon's fruit and vegetables to Baghdad, while the second carries

Lebanese oil to Tehran, and the towing plane itself carries other freight or passengers to New Delhi.

The convoy passes over Baghdad at a towering height; the first car slips loose from it, steered by a pilot inside it, and without an engine sets down at the Baghdad airport in all ease and safety, thanks to its conveyance, discharging its exports; meanwhile the convoy continues on its way to drop the second car at Tehran; then the mother plane sets down its burdens at New Delhi, bringing it the passengers and the other freight.

And these freight cars can be manufactured in Lebanon, to Lebanese designs and of Lebanese or Eastern materials, apart from a few raw materials imported from abroad.

And there are many projects and surprises which we cannot explain or foretell now, in view of the shortness of time and the swift development taking place in this important field of the world's means of transport and communication.

The renaissance of the East today rests, in its spirituality, upon the teachings of the East alone — the East being the source of light — while it draws from the West some of its arts and what pertains to the harnessing of matter for the sake of civilization. The East has likewise come to realize that spirit and matter met in it in its past ages, whereupon it illuminated the world and supplied it with the means of spiritual and material civilization; and that in order to regain that ancient glory it must rely on its two halves working together, hand in hand. For this reason it has begun to remove the obstacles that deprived its lands of the work of their women, and has begun to restore to women their rights — a phe-nomenon that appears plainly in most modern laws.

Yet woman's rights remain incomplete; and once her equality with man is complete, it will become her absolute right to hold every office, among them the assumption of judicial power.

As concerns Lebanon in particular, the latest legislation touching woman's rights is the opening of the ballot before her, to elect and to be elected. But this measure is still incomplete, and it will result, for instance, in there being nothing to prevent a woman deputy from becoming Minister of Justice, while she still could not assume the judgeship; for the organization of the courts still carries in its texts what withholds this right from woman, and it is well known that a special text can be removed only by another special text — and this has not yet happened.

There remains the heart of the matter, namely: is woman fit to assume the judgeship? From the theo-retical standpoint the answer is yes! As for the prac-tical standpoint, the matter must be looked at from

another side. Let us begin by defining the judgeship: "It is the settling of disputes among people by the rulings received from the existing laws and statutes; it is also the imposing of penalties upon criminals." The first thing this definition implies is the judge's knowledge of the laws and statutes — and there is nothing to show us that woman is unequal to that. It may even be possible that she would have more patience for it than men. But can woman endure the hardships of the profession, the least of whose demands is study that continues a lifetime and effort that wears out body and soul together, and among whose minimal requirements are withdrawal and isolation? That, too, may be within woman's power; but the likelihood is that woman will keep away from it, by force of her own nature and by force of the nature of the work itself. Her case in this will be as it is in the other professions: a woman may become a lawyer, but she keeps away from the criminal court and from the great civil disputes and turns instead to the juvenile courts; she may learn engineering, but she recoils from work in the mines and works in gardens and the countryside; she may excel in the study of medicine, but she will not become a surgeon amputating limbs — the profession leads her rather to the care of children or of mothers, or she works in the far-flung medical field where there is no exhaustion or draining of strength on a wide scale. All this leads to the conclusion that woman has the right to become a judge, but that once she sits in judgment her nature will lead her to the juvenile courts, to consider the problems of childhood and other social matters. In fact it is in this field alone that she has been employed up to now in the countries whose courts include women judges — and even so, the matter is still in the experimental stage.