“I deeply mourn that Springfield has been almost ready to bleed and die over the flying-machine issue. I am sorry that either our good or our bad people are obsessed. The father of the souls of many of our young people seems the telegraph, the mother, the railroad. There does not appear to be a filament of their minds made of anything more human than the uncanny filament of the incandescent light. When they peer into the future of our city, they imagine our optical factories and the like, hard at work producing things like the new lens gun but more ingenious. The odor of acids is ever on their garments, never the incense of some future Christmas day. They envy the discovery of the three new infinitesimal elements by the chemists of Singapore. No wonder some of them finally turn to the green and speckled lotus and the cocaine Buddha. “The service this type of imagination has done our city is calculable, definite. People moved by it have made our factories the most notable of the kind in this region of the United States. And they give us also an airship of the mind that carries us far into the future and we return heavily ladened. We examine the treasure. It is a funny little creature called ‘man,’ carrying an extraordinary world conquering device, some amorphous, dubious toy, akin to the ancient phonograph. “Let us agree that whatever carries bread across the world is of service. Whatever puts a roof over the head of democracy is worth while. Whatever puts clothing on the back of mankind must be respected. And because they fetch and carry well, such gifts as the dragons of Eric Hedder are not to be gainsaid in this place. “But let us not hesitate to examine such devices and consider where this matter of toy-making is going to lead us. Will the millennial future be a tin and wire world, an electrical experiment station, and no more? “We compare it to the automobile. The advantage is all on the side of the flying machine. The automobile is a sort of racing hog. The flying machine is, by comparison, a wild swan. And, crossing world oceans, it works for world unity.” Avanel’s face is taking on the deepest crimson I have ever seen upon it. About every tenth sentence is her own. St. Friend laughs, the congregation supposes, at his own wit. He continues:— “And for the fatness of the overfed automobile driver we substitute the leanness of the bird-boned boy or girl aviator. The flying machine is a representative of the perilous privilege of physical aspiration. But what goes up must come down. The aviator is sure of a return journey. Portia will tell us, in an exalted mood, that the aviator is up there to investigate the great milky way for us. She will tell us that clouds and sky now enter into the pleasure landscape of democracy. She makes it plain to us that the tops of the sunset towers, of the man-built Truth Tower, are not the top of the Universe.