of hope, out of faith, the lives of men.  The mere fastened-down stable things, the mere actual facts, stopped being the world with Columbus, and the air and the sky began to be swung in, and to be swept through the thoughts and acts of men and of women....  Then miners, mariners, explorers, inventors—­the impossible steamship, the railway, the impossible cotton-gin and sewing-machine and reaper, Hoosac tunnels and Atlantic cables.  The impossible became one of the habits of modern life.

Of course the sky and the air and the unknown and the future had been recognized before, but only a little and in a rather patronizing way.  But when a world has made a great, solid continent by following a horizon line, it begins to take things just beyond very seriously.  And so our Time has been fulfilled.  We have had the stone age; we have had the iron age; and now we have the sky age, and the sky telegraph, and sky men, and sky cities.  Mountains of stone are built out of men’s visions, towers and skyscrapers swing up out of their wills and up out of their hearts.

* * * * *

Not long ago, as I was coming away from New York in the Springfield Express, which was running at fifty-five miles an hour, I saw suddenly some smoke coming up apparently out of a satchel on the floor, belonging to the man in the chair in front of me.  I moved the satchel away, and the smoke came up through the carpet.  I spoke to the Pullman conductor who was passing through, and in a second the train had stopped, and the great wild roaring Thing had ceased, and we stood in a long, wide, white silence in the fields.  We got off the car—­some of us—­to see what had happened, and to see if there was a hot box on the wheels.  We found that the entire underside of the floor of the car was on fire, and what had happened?  Nothing except a new impossibility; nothing except that a human being had invented an electrical locomotive so powerful that it was pulling that train fifty-five miles an hour while the brakes on the car were set—­twelve brakes all grinding twenty miles on those twelve wheels; and the locomotive paid no more attention to the brakes of that heavy Pullman than it would to a feather or to a small boy, all the way from New York to Stamford, hanging on behind.  As I came in I looked again at the train—­the long dull train that had been pulled along by the Invisible, by the kingdom of the air and the sky—­the long, dull, heavy Train!  And the spirit of the far-off sun was in it!

In Count Zeppelin’s new airship the new social spirit has a symbol, and in the gyroscopic train the inspired millionaire is on a firm foundation.  The power of the new kind and new size of capitalist is his power of keeping an equilibrium with the people, and the men of real genius in modern affairs are men who have motor genius and light genius over other men’s wills.  They are allied to the X-ray and the airship, and gain their pre-eminence by their