shores of Lake Le Barge, in which half
a thousand gold seekers lay storm-bound. Day after day they struggled
against the seas in the teeth of a northerly gale, and night after night
returned to their camps, repulsed but not disheartened. At the rapids
they ran their boats through, hit or miss, and after infinite toil and
hardship, on the breast of a jarring ice flood, arrived at the Klondike.
From the beach at Dyea to the eddy below the Barracks at Dawson, they had
paid for their temerity the tax of human life demanded by the elements.
A year later, so greatly had the country shrunk, the tourist, on
disembarking from the ocean steamship, took his seat in a modern railway
coach. A few hours later, at Lake Bennet, he stepped aboard a commodious
river steamer. At the rapids he rode around on a tramway to take passage
on another steamer below. And in a few hours more he was in Dawson,
without having once soiled the lustre of his civilized foot-gear. Did he
wish to communicate with the outside world, he strolled into the
telegraph office. A few short months before he would have written a
letter and deemed himself favoured above mortals were it delivered within
the year.

From man's drawing the world closer and closer together, his own affairs
and institutions have consolidated. Concentration may typify the chief
movement of the age--concentration, classification, order; the reduction
of friction between the parts of the social organism. The urban tendency
of the rural populations led to terrible congestion in the great cities.
There was stifling and impure air, and lo, rapid transit at once attacked
the evil. Every great city has become but the nucleus of a greater city
which surrounds it; the one the seat of business, the other the seat of
domestic happiness. Between the two, night and morning, by electric
road, steam railway, and bicycle path, ebbs and flows the middle-class
population. And in the same direction lies the remedy for the tenement
evil. In the cleansing country air the slum cannot exist. Improvement
in road-beds and the means of locomotion, a tremor of altruism, a little
legislation, and the city by day will sleep in the country by night.

What a play-ball has this planet of ours become! Steam has made its
parts accessible and drawn them closer together. The telegraph
annihilates space and time. Each morning every part knows what every
other part is thinking, contemplating, or doing. A disc