orce. However
much new knowledge may do with electricity in the laboratory, in the
factory, or in the exchange, some of its best work is already done. It
is not likely ever to perform a greater feat than placing all mankind
within ear-shot of each other. Were electricity unmastered there could
be no democratic government of the United States. To-day the drama of
national affairs is more directly in view of every American citizen
than, a century ago, the public business of Delaware could be to the men
of that little State. And when on the broader stage of international
politics misunderstandings arise, let us note how the telegraph has
modified the hard-and-fast rules of old-time diplomacy. To-day, through
the columns of the press, the facts in controversy are instantly
published throughout the world, and thus so speedily give rise to
authoritative comment that a severe strain is put upon negotiators whose
tradition it is to be both secret and slow.

Railroads, with all they mean for civilization, could not have extended
themselves without the telegraph to control them. And railroads and
telegraphs are the sinews and nerves of national life, the prime
agencies in welding the diverse and widely separated States and
Territories of the Union. A Boston merchant builds a cotton-mill in
Georgia; a New York capitalist opens a copper-mine in Arizona. The
telegraph which informs them day by day how their investments prosper
tells idle men where they can find work, where work can seek idle men.
Chicago is laid in ashes, Charleston topples in earthquake, Johnstown is
whelmed in flood, and instantly a continent springs to their relief. And
what benefits issue in the strictly commercial uses of the telegraph!
At its click both locomotive and steamship speed to the relief of famine
in any quarter of the globe. In times of plenty or of dearth the markets
of the globe are merged and are brought to every man's door. Not less
striking is the neighbourhood guild of science, born, too, of the
telegraph. The day after Roentgen announced his X rays, physicists on
every continent were repeating his experiments--were applying his
discovery to the healing of the wounded and diseased. Let an anti-toxin
for diphtheria, consumption, or yellow fever be proposed, and a hundred
investigators the world over bend their skill to confirm or disprove, as
if the suggester dwelt next door.

On a stage less dramatic, or rather not dramatic at all, electricit