There is a type
of social prophet allied to Verne. Edward Bellamy, in Looking Backward,
reduced the world to a matter of pressing the button, turning on the
phonograph. It was a combination of glorified department-store and Coney
Island, on a cooperative basis. A seventeen-year-old boy from the
country, making his first visit to the Woolworth building in New York,
and riding in the subway when it is not too crowded, might be persuaded
by an eloquent city relative that this is Bellamy's New Jerusalem.

A soul with a greater insight is H.G. Wells. But he too, in spite of his
humanitarian heart, has, in a great mass of his work, the laboratory
imagination. Serious Americans pronounce themselves beneficiaries of
Wells' works, and I confess myself edified and thoroughly grateful.
Nevertheless, one smells chemicals in the next room when he reads most of
Wells' prophecies. The X-ray has moved that Englishman's mind more
dangerously than moonlight touches the brain of the chanting witch. One
striking and typical story is The Food of the Gods. It is not only a fine
speculation, but a great parable. The reader may prefer other tales. Many
times Wells has gone into his laboratory to invent our future, in the
same state of mind in which an automobile manufacturer works out an
improvement in his car. His disposition has greatly mellowed of late, in
this respect, but underneath he is the same Wells.

Citizens of America, wise or foolish, when they look into the coming
days, have the submarine mood of Verne, the press-the-button complacency
of Bellamy, the wireless telegraph enthusiasm of Wells. If they express
hopes that can be put into pictures with definite edges, they order
machinery piled to the skies. They see the redeemed United States running
deftly in its jewelled sockets, ticking like a watch.

This, their own chosen outlook, wearies the imaginations of our people,
they do not know why. It gives no full-orbed apocalyptic joy. Only to the
young mechanical engineer does such a hope express real Utopia. He can
always keep ahead of the devices that herald its approach. No matter what
day we attain and how busy we are adjusting ourselves, he can be moving
on, inventing more to-morrows; ruling the age, not being ruled by it.

Because this Utopia is in the air, a goodly portion of the precocious
boys turn to mechanical engineering. Youths with this bent are the most
healthful and inspiring young citizens we have. They and their