wn
cocoon, and sailing upon the air--sailing with him, sailing with the
churches, with the factories, and with the schools, with History,
through the Invisible, through the Intangible--out to the Sun....

* * * * *

Perhaps the reason that New York was a great city a few minutes the
other day when Wilbur Wright was there was that Wilbur Wright had a new
vision in the presence of all those men of something that they could do.
He touched the imagination of men about themselves. They were profoundly
moved because they saw him in their presence inventing a new kind and
new size of human being. He raised the standard of impossibility, and
built an annex on to the planet while they looked; took a great strip
off of space three miles wide and folded it softly on to the planet all
the way round before their eyes. For three miles more--three miles
farther up above the ground--there was a space where human beings would
have to stop saying, "I can't," and "You can't," and "We can't." If
people want to say "I can't," and "You can't," they will have to say it
farther and farther away from this planet now. Let them try Mars. The
modern imagination takes to impossibilities naturally with Wilbur Wright
against the horizon. The thing we next cannot believe is the next thing
to expect.

Nobody would have believed ten years ago that an architect could be
invented who would tell a man that his house would cost him thirty
thousand dollars, and then hand him back two thousand dollars when he
had finished it. But the man had been invented--he invented himself.

He represents the owner, and does as the owner would be done by if he
did it himself--if he had the technical knowledge and the time to do it.

Nobody would have believed a few years ago that a railway president,
when he had occasion to reduce the wages of several thousand employees
10 per cent., would begin by reducing his own salary 30 per cent., and
the salary of all the officials all the way down 15 per cent., or 20 per
cent.

Nobody would have believed some time ago that an organizing inventor
would be evolved who would meet his directors and tell them that, if
they would have their work done in their mills in three shifts instead
of two, the men would work so much better that it would not cost the
Company more than 10 per cent. more to offer the better conditions. But
such an organizing inventor has been invented, and has proved his case.

L