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. One was in a little special civilization for the time being, all the new people in it sorted out from the old ones. One felt a vast light-heartedness all about. One was in the presence of the picked people who had come to see this first vast initiative of man toward Space, toward the stars, the people who had waited for four thousand years to see it; to see at last Little Man (as it would seem to God) in this his first clumsy, beautiful childlike tottering up the sky. One was with the people on the planet who were the first to see the practical, personal value, the market value, of all these huge idle fields of air that go with planets. They were the first people to feel identified with the air, to have courage for the air, the lovers of initiative, the men and women that one felt might really get a new world if they wanted one and who would know what to do with it when they got it. * * * * *