He allowed the Pole to be a Crowd affair.  All the while as he went about the country holding his little exhibits of the tip of the planet we could not help wishing, many of us who were in the Audience, that this man who sat there before us, the man who had the Thing in his hand, who had collected the North Pole, would not notice us, would snub us if need be a little, and would leave these people, these millions of people, with their heads up and go quietly on to the South Pole and collect that.  It is because there are thousands of men who understand just how Wilbur Wright felt when he slipped away the other day in New York and left the entire city with its heads up that we have every 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.

And God, when He made the world.  And Columbus when he discovered America.  And Jesus Christ when He was so happy and so preoccupied over His vision of a new world, over inventing Christianity, that it seemed a very small and incidental thing to die on the Cross—­He understood.