t
is only fair to say that these first few thousand men and women of all
classes who responded to the flying machine would be possessed, as any
one could see with a look, of special qualifications for running worlds.

I shall never quite forget the sense I had the first day of the crowd at
Hendon--those thousands of faces that had gathered up in some way out of
themselves a kind of huge crowd-face before one--that imperturbable
happiness on it and that look of hard sense and hope, half poetry, half
science ... it was like gazing at some portrait, or some vast
countenance of the future--watching the crowd at Hendon. Scores of times
I looked away from the machines swinging up past me into the sky to
watch the faces of the men and the women that belonged with sky
machines; these men and women who stood on the precipice of a new world
of air, of sunshine, and of darkness, and were not afraid.

One was in a little special civilization for the time being, all the new
people in it sorted out from the old ones. One felt a vast
light-heartedness all about. One was in the presence of the picked
people who had come to see this first vast initiative of man toward
Space, toward the stars, the people who had waited for four thousand
years to see it; to see at last Little Man (as it would seem to God) in
this his first clumsy, beautiful childlike tottering up the sky.

One was with the people on the planet who were the first to see the
practical, personal value, the market value, of all these huge idle
fields of air that go with planets. They were the first people to feel
identified with the air, to have courage for the air, the lovers of
initiative, the men and women that one felt might really get a new world
if they wanted one and who would know what to do with it when they got
it.

* * * * *

The other day in London near Charing Cross, as the crowds were streaming
down the Strand, a heavy box joggled off over the end of a dray, crashed
to the pavement, flew open and sent twenty-four hundred pennies rolling
under the feet of the men and of the women and of the boys along the
street.

Traffic was stopped and a thousand men and women and boys began picking
the pennies up. They all crowded up around the dray and put the pennies
in the box.

The next day the brewer to whom the pennies belonged had a letter in the
_Times_ saying that not one of the twenty-four hundred pennies was
missing.

He clo