This is what the common run of men about us—­the men of less creative type in literature, in business, and in politics—­are doing.  They do not believe human nature is changing.  They are living down to a world that is going by.  They are living down to a world that is smaller than they are themselves.  They are trying to make others do it.  They answer the question “Does human nature change?” by “No!” Wilbur Wright, when he flew around over the heads of the people in New York a few years ago, a black speck above a whole city with its heads up, answered “Yes!”

But the real importance of the flying machine has not stopped short with a little delicate, graceful thing like walking on the air instead of the ground.

The big and really revolutionary thing about Wilbur Wright’s flying was that he changed the minds of the whole human race in a few minutes about one thing.  There was one particular thing that for forty thousand years they knew they could not do.  And now they knew they could.

It naturally follows—­and it lies in the mind of every man who lives—­that there must be other particular things.  And as nine men out of ten are in business, most of these particular things are going to be done in business.

The Wilbur Wright spirit is catching.

It is as if a Lid had been lifted off the world.

One sees everywhere business men going about the street expecting new things of themselves.  They expect things of the very ground, and of the air, and of one another they had not dared expect before.

The other day in a New England city I saw a man, who had been the president of an Electric Light Company for twenty years, who had invented a public service corporation that worked.  Since he took office and dictated the policy of the Company, every single overture for more expensive equipment in the electric lighting of the city has come from the Company, and every single overture for reducing the rate to consumers has come from the company.

The consumption of electricity in the city is the largest per capita in the world, and the rate is the cheapest in the country; and, incidentally, the Company so trusts the people that they let them have electricity without metres, and the people so trust the Company that they save its electricity as they would their own.

Even the man without a conscience, who would be mean if he could, is brought to terms, and knows that if he refrains from leaving his lights burning all night when he goes to bed he is not merely saving the Company’s electricity but his own.  He knows that he is reducing his own and everybody’s price for electricity, and not merely increasing the profits of the Company.

It makes another kind of man slowly out of thousands of men every day, every night, turning on and turning off their lights.

The Electric Light Company has come to have a daily, an almost hourly, influence on the way men do business and go about their work in that city—­the motives and assumptions with which they bargain with one another—­that might be envied by twenty churches.