ity needed for the transformation of
the water is very small. One pound of good coal will evaporate nine
pounds of water, equal to about 250 cubic inches, this doing 250
foot-tons of work. But Niagara performs the same amount of work at
infinitely less cost. However small any quantity may be, its ratio to
nothing is infinity.

It has been the custom during the nineteenth century to institute
comparisons between the marvellous economy of steam power and the
expensive wastefulness of human muscular effort. For instance, the
full day's work of an Eastern porter, specially trained to carry heavy
weights, will generally amount to the removal of a load of from three
to five hundred-weight for a distance of one mile; but such a labourer
in the course of a long day has only expended as much power as would
be stored up in about five ounces of coal.

Still the fact remains that one of the greatest problems of the future
is that which concerns the reduction in the cost of power. Hundreds
of millions of the human race pass lives of a kind of dull monotonous
toil which develops only the muscular, at the expense of the higher,
faculties of the body; they are almost entirely cut off from social
intercourse with their fellow-men, and they sink prematurely into
decrepitude simply by reason of the lack of a cheap and abundant
supply of mechanical power, ready at hand wherever it is wanted.
Scores of "enterprises of great pith and moment" in the industrial
advancement of the world have to be abandoned by reason of the same
lack. In mining, in agriculture, in transport and in manufacture the
thing that is needful to convert the "human machine" into a more or
less intelligent brainworker is cheaper power. All the technical
education in the world will not avail to raise the labourer in the
intellectual scale if his daily work be only such as a horse or an
engine might perform.

The transmission of power through the medium of the electric current
will naturally attain its first great development in the
neighbourhoods of large waterfalls such as Niagara. When the
manufacturers within a short radius of the source of power in each
case have begun to fully reap the benefit due to cheap power,
competition will assert itself in many different ways. The values of
real property will rise, and population will tend to become congested
within the localities' served.

It will be found, however, that facilities for shipment will to a
large extent pe