A man named Stephen, one day, while he was dying, gave a look at a man named Paul.  Paul came away quietly and hewed out history for two thousand years.

CHAPTER XVI

EXCEPTION

A bicycle, the other day, a little outside Paris as it was running along quietly, lifted itself off the ground suddenly, and flew three yards and seven inches.

There are nine million seven hundred and eighty nine thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine bicycles that have not flown three yards and seven inches.

But what of it?  Why count them up?  Why bother about them?  The important, conclusive, massive, irresistible, crushing, material fact is that one bicycle has flown three yards seven inches.

The nine million seven hundred and eighty-nine thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine bicycles that can not fly yet are negligible.  So are nine out of ten business firms.

If there is one exceptional man in modern industry who is running his business in the right way and who has made a success of it and has proved it—­he may look visionary to class-socialists and to other people who decide by measuring off masses of fact, and counting up rows of people and who see what anybody can see, but he is after all in arranging our social programme the only man of any material importance for us to consider.  It would be visionary to take the past, dump it around in front of one, and try to make a future out of it.  I do not deny what people tell me about millionaires and about factory slaves.  I have not mooned or lied or turned away my face.  I stand by time one live, right, implacable, irrevocable, prolific exception.  I stand by the one bicycle out of them all that has flown three yards and seven inches.  I lay out my program, conceive my world on that.  Piles of facts arranged in dead layers high against heaven, rows of figures, miles of factory slaves, acres of cemeteries of dead millionaires, going-by streetfuls of going-by people, shall not cow me.

My heart has been broken long enough by counting truths on my fingers, by numbering grains of sand, men, and mountains, bombs, acorns and marbles alike.

Which truth matters?

Which man is right?

Where is Nazareth?

* * * * *

Nazareth is our only really important town now.  I will see what is going on in Nazareth.  On every subject that comes up, in every line of thought, I will go to the city of implacable exceptions.  All the inventors flock there—­the man with the one bicycle which flies, the one great industrial organizer, the man with the man-machine, and the man—­the great boy who carries new great beautiful cities in his pocket like strings and nails and knives, they are all there.

Nazareth is the city, the one mighty little city of the spirit where all the really worth-while men wherever they may seem to be, all day, all night, do their living.