Wilbur Wright’s secret was that he had a vision.  His vision was that a human being could be greater and more powerful than the world had ever believed before.

Just to be there was a great thought, to be allowed to be one of those admitted, to be present at the first faint beginning, the first still alighting of the human spirit from the earth upon the sky.  Wilbur Wright made the most ordinary man a genius a minute.  He made him wonder softly who he was—­and the people all about him—­who were they? and what would they think, and what would they do next?  The first flash of light on the wings was a thousand years.  It was as if almost for a moment he saw at last the whole earth about him.  History, churches, factories on it, slipping out of its cocoon at last—­its little, old, faded, tied-down cocoon, and sailing upon the air—­sailing with him, sailing with the churches, with the factories, and with the schools, with History, through the Invisible, through the Intangible—­out to the Sun....

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Perhaps the reason that New York was a great city a few minutes the other day when Wilbur Wright was there was that Wilbur Wright had a new vision in the presence of all those men of something that they could do.  He touched the imagination of men about themselves.  They were profoundly moved because they saw him in their presence inventing a new kind and new size of human being.  He raised the standard of impossibility, and built an annex on to the planet while they looked; took a great strip off of space three miles wide and folded it softly on to the planet all the way round before their eyes.  For three miles more—­three miles farther up above the ground—­there was a space where human beings would have to stop saying, “I can’t,” and “You can’t,” and “We can’t.”  If people want to say “I can’t,” and “You can’t,” they will have to say it farther and farther away from this planet now.  Let them try Mars.  The modern imagination takes to impossibilities naturally with Wilbur Wright against the horizon.  The thing we next cannot believe is the next thing to expect.

Nobody would have believed ten years ago that an architect could be invented who would tell a man that his house would cost him thirty thousand dollars, and then hand him back two thousand dollars when he had finished it.  But the man had been invented—­he invented himself.

He represents the owner, and does as the owner would be done by if he did it himself—­if he had the technical knowledge and the time to do it.

Nobody would have believed a few years ago that a railway president, when he had occasion to reduce the wages of several thousand employees 10 per cent., would begin by reducing his own salary 30 per cent., and the salary of all the officials all the way down 15 per cent., or 20 per cent.

Nobody would have believed some time ago that an organizing inventor would be evolved who would meet his directors and tell them that, if they would have their work done in their mills in three shifts instead of two, the men would work so much better that it would not cost the Company more than 10 per cent. more to offer the better conditions.  But such an organizing inventor has been invented, and has proved his case.