How much time and how many years of producing-power would it have saved America if Alexander Graham Bell had known or could have had ready to appeal to, America's first hundred thousand picked men of imagination, when he was trudging around ringing doorbells in Boston, trying to supply people with imagination enough to see money in telephones?
If William G. McAdoo, when he had invented with his tunnels, a really great conception of the greater New York, and was fighting to get people in New York to believe in it, and act on it, had had an organization of one hundred thousand picked men of imagination in the nation at large to appeal to—one hundred thousand men picked out by one another to put a premium on constructive imagination when they saw some, instead of a penalty on it, how much time would it have saved New York and saved McAdoo? How much time would a national Club like this save this nation to-day and from now on in its race with the Germans?
Why should our men of practical creative imagination to-day waste as much time running around and asking permission of people who had none, as McAdoo had to?
If a hundred thousand silver dollars—just ordinary silver dollars—were put together in a row in New York on a sidewalk, everybody going by would have imagination at once about the one hundred thousand silver dollars and what could be done with them.
But put one hundred thousand picked men—or men of exceptional power together in a row in New York—and why is it everybody is apt to feel at first a little vague and troubled about them, stands off around the corner and wonders what can be done with one hundred thousand immortal human beings?
I wish people would have as much imagination about what could be done with one hundred thousand fellow human beings picked out and got together from the men of this nation, as they would have about one hundred thousand silver dollars.
This is one of the first things the Look-Up Club is for, to get people to be inspired by a hundred thousand men put together, in the same way that they are by a hundred thousand dollars put together.
I went out last night and walked up the Great White Way and looked at the little flock of hotels that are standing to-day on the site of my faith in these hundred thousand men—the site of the new hotel—the little sleeping shelf in the roar of New York for the hundred thousand men to have on Broadway.