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 like will fulfil a multitude of the hopes of men like Verne, Bellamy, and Wells.

But if every mechanical inventor on earth voiced his dearest wish and lived to see it worked out, the real drama of prophecy and fulfilment, as written in the imagination of the human race, would remain uncompleted.

As Mrs. Browning says in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship:—­

    If we trod the deeps of ocean, if we struck the stars in rising,
    If we wrapped the globe intensely with one hot electric breath,
    ’Twere but power within our tether, no new spirit-power comprising,
    And in life we were not greater men, nor bolder men in death.

St. John beheld the New Jerusalem coming down out of Heaven prepared as a bride adorned for her husband, not equipped as a touring car varnished for its owner.

It is my hope that the moving picture prophet-wizards will set before the world a new group of pictures of the future.  The chapter on The Architect as a Crusader endeavors to show how, by proclaiming that America will become a permanent World’s Fair, she can be made so within the lives of men now living, if courageous architects have the campaign in hand.  There are other hopes that look a long way further.  They peer as far into the coming day as the Chinese historian looks into the past.  And then they are but halfway to the millennium.