one bicycle which flies, the one
great industrial organizer, the man with the man-machine, and the
man--the great boy who carries new great beautiful cities in his pocket
like strings and nails and knives, they are all there.

Nazareth is the city, the one mighty little city of the spirit where all
the really worth-while men wherever they may seem to be, all day, all
night, do their living.

Other cities may make things, in Nazareth they make worlds. One can see
a new one almost any day in Nazareth. Men go up and down the streets
there with their new worlds in their eyes.

Some of them have them almost in their hands or are looking down and
working on them.

It does not seem to me that any of us can make ourselves strong and fit
to lay out a sound program or vision for a world, who do not watch with
critical expectation and with fierce joy these men of Nazareth, who do
not take at least a little time off every day, in spirit, in Nazareth,
and spend it in watching bicycles fly three feet and seven inches. To
watch these men, it seems to me, is our one natural, economical way to
get at essential facts, at the set-one-side truths, at the exceptions
that worlds and all-around programs for worlds are made out of. To watch
these men is the one way I know not to be lost in great museums and
storehouses of facts that do not matter, in the streetfuls and
skyscraperfuls of men that go by.

I regret to record that professors of political economy, social
philosophers, industrial big-wigs, presidents of boards of trade have
not been often met with on the streets of this silent, crowded, mighty,
invisible little town that rules the destinies of men.

Not during the last twenty years, but one is meeting them there to-day.

All these things that people are saying to me are mere history. I have
seen the one live exception. One telephone was enough. And one Galileo
was enough, with his little planet turning round and round, with all of
us on it who were obliged to agree with him about it. It kept turning
round and round with us until we did.

CHAPTER XVII

INVENTION

If I were a Noah and wanted to get a fair selection of people in London
to be saved to start a new world, I would go out and look over the crowd
who are watching the flying machines at Hendon, and select from them.

The Hendon crowd will not last forever. People who would be far less
desirable to start worlds with would gradually work their way in, but i