to see if there was a hot box on the wheels. We found
that the entire underside of the floor of the car was on fire, and what
had happened? Nothing except a new impossibility; nothing except that a
human being had invented an electrical locomotive so powerful that it
was pulling that train fifty-five miles an hour while the brakes on the
car were set--twelve brakes all grinding twenty miles on those twelve
wheels; and the locomotive paid no more attention to the brakes of that
heavy Pullman than it would to a feather or to a small boy, all the way
from New York to Stamford, hanging on behind. As I came in I looked
again at the train--the long dull train that had been pulled along by
the Invisible, by the kingdom of the air and the sky--the long, dull,
heavy Train! And the spirit of the far-off sun was in it!

In Count Zeppelin's new airship the new social spirit has a symbol, and
in the gyroscopic train the inspired millionaire is on a firm
foundation. The power of the new kind and new size of capitalist is his
power of keeping an equilibrium with the people, and the men of real
genius in modern affairs are men who have motor genius and light genius
over other men's wills. They are allied to the X-ray and the airship,
and gain their pre-eminence by their power of forecast and
invention--their power of riding upon the unseen, upon the thoughts of
men and the spirit of the time. Even the painters have caught this
spirit. The plein air painters are painting the light, and the sculptors
are carving shadows and haloes, and we have not an art left which does
not lean out into the Invisible. And religion is full of this spirit and
theosophy and Christian Science. The playwrights are touched by it; and
the action, instead of being all on the stage, is thrown out into the
spirit of the audience. The play in a modern theatre is not on the stage
but in the stalls. Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Shaw, merely use the stage as a
kind of magic-lantern or suggestion-centre for the real things that, out
behind us in the dark, are happening in the audience.

CHAPTER VIII

THE CROWD'S IMAGINATION ABOUT THE FUTURE

I remember looking over with H.G. Wells one night some time ago a set of
pictures or photographs of the future in America, which he had brought
home with him. They were largely skyscrapers, big bridges, Niagaras, and
things; and I could not help thinking, as I came home that night, how
much more Mr. Wells had of the future of A