merica in his own mind than he
could possibly buy in his photographs. What funny little films they were
after all, how faint and pathetic, how almost tragically dull, those
pictures of the future of my country were! H.G. Wells himself, standing
in his own doorway, was more like America, and more like the future of
America, than the pictures were.

The future in America cannot be pictured. The only place it can be seen
is in people's faces. Go out into the street, in New York, in Chicago,
in San Francisco, in Seattle; look eagerly as you go into the faces of
the men who pass, and you feel hundreds of years--the next hundred
years--like a breath, swept past. America, with all its forty-story
buildings, its little Play Niagaras, its great dumb Rockies, is the
unseen country. It can only as yet be seen in people's eyes. Some days,
flowing sublime and silent through our noisy streets, and through the
vast panorama of our towers, I have heard the footfalls of the unborn,
like sunshine around me.

This feeling America gives one in the streets is the real America. The
solidity, the finality, the substantial fact in America, is the daily
sense in the streets of the future. And it has seemed to me that this
fact--whether one observes it in Americans in America, in Americans in
England and in other nations--is what one might call, for lack of a
better name, the American temperament in all peoples is the most
outstanding typical and important fact with which our modern world and
our philosophy about the world have now to reckon. Nothing can be seen
as it really is if this amazing pervasive hourly sense of the future is
left out of it.

All power is rapidly coming to be based on news--news about human
nature, and about what is soon to be done by people. This news travels
by express in boxes, by newspapers, by telephone, by word of mouth, and
by wireless telegraph. Most of the wireless news is not only wireless,
but it is in cipher--hence prophets, or men who have great
sensitiveness; men whose souls and bodies are films for the future,
platinum plates for the lights and shadows of events; men who are
world-poets, sensitive to the air-waves and the light-waves of truth, to
the faintest vibrations from To-morrow, or from the next hundred years
hovering just ahead. As a matter of course, it is already coming to be
true that the most practical man to-day is the prophet. In the older
days, men used to look back for wisdom, and the pra