st
begun. Twenty years ago it was hardly possible for a man standing on one
side of the street to make himself heard on the other, the acoustic
properties of the atmosphere not being what they should be. To-day
you can stand in the pulpit of your church, and by means of certain
scientific apparatus make yourself heard in Boston, New Orleans, or San
Francisco. Has this no bearing on the future? The time will come, Mr.
Whitechoker, when your missionaries will be able to sit in their
comfortable rectories, and ring up the heathen in foreign climes, and
convert them over the telephone, without running the slightest danger of
falling into the soup, which expression I use in its literal rather than
in its metaphorical sense."

[Illustration: "YOU CAN MAKE YOURSELF HEARD IN SAN FRANCISCO"]

"But--" interrupted Mr. Whitechoker.

"Now wait, please," said the Idiot. "If science can annihilate degrees of
distance, who shall say that before many days science may not annihilate
degrees of time? If San Francisco, thousands of miles distant, can be
brought within range of the ear, why cannot 1990 be brought before the
mind's eye? And if 1990 can be brought before the mind's eye, what is to
prevent the invention of a prophetograph which shall enable us to cast a
horoscope which shall reach all around eternity and half-way back, if not
further?"

[Illustration: THE PROPHETOGRAPH]

"You do not understand me," said Mr. Whitechoker. "When I speak of the
future, I do not mean the temporal future."

"I know exactly what you mean," said the Idiot. "I've dealt in futures,
and I am familiar with all kinds. It is you, sir, that do not understand
me. My claim is perfectly plausible, and in its results is bound to make
the world better. Do you suppose that any man who, by the aid of my
prophetograph, sees that on a certain date in the future he will be
hanged for murder is going to fail to provide himself with an alibi in
regard to that particular murder, and must we not admit that having
provided himself with that alibi he will of necessity avoid bloodshed,
and so avoid the gallows? That's reasonable. So in regard to all the
thousand and one other peccadilloes that go to make this life a sinful
one. Science, by a purely logical advance along the lines already mapped
out for itself, and in part already traversed, will enable men to avoid
the pitfalls and reap only the windfalls of life; we shall all see what
terrible consequences await on a