time. Blessed be this slip of a boy who is a man before he is an infant,
and teaches us what rapid transit can do for our race! The only thing
that can possibly hinder us in our progress will be second childhood; we
have abolished first.




THE ELECTRIC WAY

We are quite in the electric way. We boast that we have made electricity
our slave, but the slave whom we do not understand is our master. And
before we know him we shall be transformed. Mr. Edison proposes to send
us over the country at the rate of one hundred miles an hour. This
pleases us, because we fancy we shall save time, and because we are
taught that the chief object in life is to "get there" quickly. We really
have an idea that it is a gain to annihilate distance, forgetting that as
a matter of personal experience we are already too near most people. But
this speed by rail will enable us to live in Philadelphia and do business
in New York. It will make the city of Chicago two hundred miles square.
And the bigger Chicago is, the more important this world becomes. This
pleasing anticipation--that of traveling by lightning, and all being
huddled together--is nothing to the promised universal illumination by a
diffused light that shall make midnight as bright as noonday. We shall
then save all the time there is, and at the age of thirty-five have lived
the allotted seventy years, and long, if not for 'Gotterdammerung', at
least for some world where, by touching a button, we can discharge our
limbs of electricity and take a little repose. The most restless and
ambitious of us can hardly conceive of Chicago as a desirable future
state of existence.