"But I must also remind you that a few yards from the doors of the White
House there lies the greatest marvel, I had almost said the greatest
miracle, that has ever been accomplished by human genius and human
industry. That wonderful vessel in which some of us have been privileged
to take the most marvellous journey in the history of mechanical
locomotion was thought out by an American man of science, the man whose
daughter sits on my right hand to-night. In her concrete material form
this vessel, destined to navigate the shoreless Ocean of Space, is
English. But she is also the result of the belief and the faith of an
Englishman in an American ideal.... So when she leaves this earth, as
she will do in an hour or so, to enter the confines of other worlds than
this--and, it may be, to make the acquaintance of peoples other than
those who inhabit the earth--she will have done infinitely more than she
has already done, incredible as that seems. She will not only have
convinced this world that the greatest triumph of human genius is of
Anglo-Saxon origin, but she will carry to other worlds than this the
truth which this world will have learnt before the nineteenth century
ends.
"England in the person of Lord Redgrave, and America in the person of
his Countess, leave this world to-night to tell the other worlds of our
system, if haply they may find some intelligible means of communication,
what this world, good and bad, is like.
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