Citizens of America, wise or foolish, when they look into the coming
days, have the submarine mood of Verne, the press-the-button complacency
of Bellamy, the wireless telegraph enthusiasm of Wells. If they express
hopes that can be put into pictures with definite edges, they order
machinery piled to the skies. They see the redeemed United States running
deftly in its jewelled sockets, ticking like a watch.
This, their own chosen outlook, wearies the imaginations of our people,
they do not know why. It gives no full-orbed apocalyptic joy. Only to the
young mechanical engineer does such a hope express real Utopia. He can
always keep ahead of the devices that herald its approach. No matter what
day we attain and how busy we are adjusting ourselves, he can be moving
on, inventing more to-morrows; ruling the age, not being ruled by it.
Because this Utopia is in the air, a goodly portion of the precocious
boys turn to mechanical engineering. Youths with this bent are the most
healthful and inspiring young citizens we have. They and their like will
fulfil a multitude of the hopes of men like Verne, Bellamy, and Wells.
But if every mechanical inventor on earth voiced his dearest wish and
lived to see it worked out, the real drama of prophecy and fulfilment, as
written in the imagination of the human race, would remain uncompleted.
As Mrs. Browning says in Lady Geraldine's Courtship:--
If we trod the deeps of ocean, if we struck the stars in rising,
If we wrapped the globe intensely with one hot electric breath,
'Twere but power within our tether, no new spirit-power comprising,
And in life we were not greater men, nor bolder men in death.
St. John beheld the New Jerusalem coming down out of Heaven prepared as a
bride adorned for her husband, not equipped as a touring car varnished
for its owner.
It is my hope that the moving picture prophet-wizards will set before the
world a new group of pictures of the future. The chapter on The Architect
as a Crusader endeavors to show how, by proclaiming that America will
become a permanent World's Fair, she can be made so within the lives of
men now living, if courageous architects have the campaign in hand. There
are other hopes that look a long way further. They peer as far into the
coming day as the Chinese historian looks into the past. And then they
are but halfway to the millennium.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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