actors and theatrical people would have
stayed over a train or so and given one more little performance with all
those wistful people on the roof-tops. There are only a very few
clergymen in England or America to-day who, with a great audience like
that and so many men in it, would ever have thought of slipping off on
the 3:25 train in the way Wilbur Wright did. The ministers and the
politicians of all countries are still wondering a little--if they ever
thought of it--how Wright did it. Most of the other people in the world
wonder a little, too, but I imagine that the great inventors of the
world who read about it the next morning did not wonder. The true
scientists, in this country and in Germany and in France, all understood
just how Wilbur Wright felt when he left New York with its heads up. The
great artists of the world, in literature, in painting, and
architecture; the great railroad builders, the city builders, the nation
builders, the great statesmen, the great biologists, and chemists,
understood. James J. Hill, with his face toward the Pacific, understood.
Alexander Graham Bell, out abroad doing the listening and talking and
thinking the thoughts of eighty million people, understood. Marconi,
making the ships whisper across the sea, and William G. McAdoo, shooting
a hundred and seventy thousand people a day through a hole under the
Hudson--understood.

And God, when He made the world. And Columbus when he discovered
America. And Jesus Christ when He was so happy and so preoccupied over
His vision of a new world, over inventing Christianity, that it seemed a
very small and incidental thing to die on the Cross--He understood.

Wilbur Wright's secret was that he had a vision. His vision was that a
human being could be greater and more powerful than the world had ever
believed before.

Just to be there was a great thought, to be allowed to be one of those
admitted, to be present at the first faint beginning, the first still
alighting of the human spirit from the earth upon the sky. Wilbur Wright
made the most ordinary man a genius a minute. He made him wonder softly
who he was--and the people all about him--who were they? and what would
they think, and what would they do next? The first flash of light on the
wings was a thousand years. It was as if almost for a moment he saw at
last the whole earth about him. History, churches, factories on it,
slipping out of its cocoon at last--its little, old, faded, tied-do