audiences tagging. There are some of us who will never cease to regret
as long as we live that the North Pole could not have waited a little.
We would rather have had Wilbur Wright discover it. One can imagine how
he would do it: fly gracefully up to it all by himself, and discover it
some pleasant evening, and have it over with, and slip back on his soft
wings in the night, and not say anything about it. It is this Wilbur
Wright spirit that I would like to dwell on in these pages. It seems to
me it is a true modern spirit, the spirit which alone could make our
civilization great, and the spirit which alone could make crowds great.
It was the crowd that spoiled the way the Pole was discovered--all the
millions of people, vast, thoughtless audiences piling in and making a
show of it. Many people in America, all the vast crowds reading about
it, seemed to feel that they were more important than the Pole; and when
Captain Peary came back, vast crowds of these same people paid as much
as five dollars apiece for the privilege of being in the same room with
him. It was quite impossible not to contrast Captain Peary in his
attitude toward the crowd and Wilbur Wright. There seemed to be, and
there will always remain, a certain vulgarity in the way the North Pole
was discovered, and the way the whole world behaved in regard to it, and
the secret seems to have been in Captain Peary's failure to be a Wilbur
Wright. He allowed the Pole to be a Crowd affair. All the while as he
went about the country holding his little exhibits of the tip of the
planet we could not help wishing, many of us who were in the Audience,
that this man who sat there before us, the man who had the Thing in his
hand, who had collected the North Pole, would not notice us, would snub
us if need be a little, and would leave these people, these millions of
people, with their heads up and go quietly on to the South Pole and
collect that. It is because there are thousands of men who understand
just how Wilbur Wright felt when he slipped away the other day in New
York and left the entire city with its heads up that we have every