ABSTRACT
The most distinctively modern thing that ever happened was when Benjamin Franklin went out one day and called down lightning from heaven. Before that, power had always been dug up, or scraped off the ground. Copernicus had the same idea, of course, when he fared forth into space, and discovered the centre of all power to be in the sun. 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 the 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.
