reason to expect that the crowd is to produce great leaders, and is to
become a great crowd, great and humble in spirit before God, before the
stars, and the atoms, and the microbes, and before Itself. In the
meantime, however, we see all about us in the world countless would-be
leaders of the crowd, who would perhaps not quite understand the way
Wilbur Wright felt that day when he slipped away from New York and left
the entire city with its heads up. Most newspaper men--men who are in
the habit of writing for a crowd and regarding a crowd quite
respectfully--will have wondered a little why Wilbur Wright could have
let such a crowd go by. Most actors and theatrical people would have
stayed over a train or so and given one more little performance with all
those wistful people on the roof-tops. There are only a very few
clergymen in England or America to-day who, with a great audience like
that and so many men in it, would ever have thought of slipping off on
the 3:25 train in the way Wilbur Wright did. The ministers and the
politicians of all countries are still wondering a little--if they ever
thought of it--how Wright did it. Most of the other people in the world
wonder a little, too, but I imagine that the great inventors of the
world who read about it the next morning did not wonder. The true
scientists, in this country and in Germany and in France, all understood
just how Wilbur Wright felt when he left New York with its heads up. The
great artists of the world, in literature, in painting, and
architecture; the great railroad builders, the city builders, the nation
builders, the great statesmen, the great biologists, and chemists,
understood. James J. Hill, with his face toward the Pacific, understood.
Alexander Graham Bell, out abroad doing the listening and talking and
thinking the thoughts of eighty million people, understood. Marconi,
making the ships whisper across the sea, and William G. McAdoo, shooting
a hundred and seventy thousand people a day through a hole under the
Hudson--understood.