But not Wilbur Wright.  Wilbur Wright would not give two million people an encore, or even come back to bow.  As one looked over from Mount Tom one could see all New York black and solid on the tops of its roofs and houses looking up into a great hole of air for him, and Wilbur Wright slipping quietly off down to Washington and leaving them there, a whole great city under the sky, with its heads up!

A little experience like this has been what New York has needed for a long time.  It takes a scientist to do these things.  I wish there were some poet who would do as well.  Even a prophet up above New York—­or seer of men and of years—­glinting his wings in the light, the New York Sun and the World and the Times down below, all their opera-glasses trained on him, and all those little funny reporters running helplessly about, all the people pouring out from Doctor Parkhurst’s church to look up....  It would be something.

Probably there are very few capitals in the world—­Paris, Berlin, or London—­that would not be profoundly stirred and possibly much improved by having some man suddenly appear up over them, who would be so interested in what he was doing that he would forget to notice whether anybody was looking—­who would be capable of slipping off quietly and leaving an entire city with its heads up, and going on and attending to business.

There have been times when we would have been relieved, some of us, if the North Pole could have been discovered in this way and without large 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.