Other cities may make things, in Nazareth they make worlds.  One can see a new one almost any day in Nazareth.  Men go up and down the streets there with their new worlds in their eyes.

Some of them have them almost in their hands or are looking down and working on them.

It does not seem to me that any of us can make ourselves strong and fit to lay out a sound program or vision for a world, who do not watch with critical expectation and with fierce joy these men of Nazareth, who do not take at least a little time off every day, in spirit, in Nazareth, and spend it in watching bicycles fly three feet and seven inches.  To watch these men, it seems to me, is our one natural, economical way to get at essential facts, at the set-one-side truths, at the exceptions that worlds and all-around programs for worlds are made out of.  To watch these men is the one way I know not to be lost in great museums and storehouses of facts that do not matter, in the streetfuls and skyscraperfuls of men that go by.

I regret to record that professors of political economy, social philosophers, industrial big-wigs, presidents of boards of trade have not been often met with on the streets of this silent, crowded, mighty, invisible little town that rules the destinies of men.

Not during the last twenty years, but one is meeting them there to-day.

All these things that people are saying to me are mere history.  I have seen the one live exception.  One telephone was enough.  And one Galileo was enough, with his little planet turning round and round, with all of us on it who were obliged to agree with him about it.  It kept turning round and round with us until we did.

CHAPTER XVII

INVENTION

If I were a Noah and wanted to get a fair selection of people in London to be saved to start a new world, I would go out and look over the crowd who are watching the flying machines at Hendon, and select from them.

The Hendon crowd will not last forever.  People who would be far less desirable to start worlds with would gradually work their way in, but it is only fair to say that these first few thousand men and women of all classes who responded to the flying machine would be possessed, as any one could see with a look, of special qualifications for running worlds.

I shall never quite forget the sense I had the first day of the crowd at Hendon—­those thousands of faces that had gathered up in some way out of themselves a kind of huge crowd-face before one—­that imperturbable happiness on it and that look of hard sense and hope, half poetry, half science ... it was like gazing at some portrait, or some vast countenance of the future—­watching the crowd at Hendon.  Scores of times I looked away from the machines swinging up past me into the sky to watch the faces of the men and the women that belonged with sky machines; these men and women who stood on the precipice of a new world of air, of sunshine, and of darkness, and were not afraid.