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.

This, however, is only the external or superficial view of the subject;
at the best it is only symbolical. Mr. Edison is wasting his time in
objective experiments, while we are in the deepest ignorance as to our
electric personality or our personal electricity. We begin to apprehend
that we are electric beings, that these outward manifestations of a
subtile form are only hints of our internal state. Mr. Edison should turn
his attention from physics to humanity electrically considered in its
social condition. We have heard a great deal about affinities. We are
told that one person is positive and another negative, and that
representing socially opposite poles they should come together and make
an electric harmony, that two positives or two negatives repel each
other, and if conventionally united end in divorce, and so on. We read
that such a man is magnetic, meaning that he can poll a great many votes;
or that such a woman thrilled her audience, meaning probably that they
were in an electric condition to be shocked by her. Now this is what we
want to find out--to know if persons are really magnetic or sympathetic,
and how to tell whether a person is positive or negative. In politics we
are quite at sea. What is the good of sending a man to Washington at the
rate of a hundred miles an hour if we are uncertain of his electric
state? The ideal House of Representatives ought to be pretty nearly
balanced--half positive, half negative. Some Congresses seem to be made
up pretty much of negatives. Th