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.  The time for the electrician to test the candidate is before he is put in nomination, not dump him into Congress as we do now, utterly ignorant of whether his currents run from his heels to his head or from his head to his heels, uncertain, indeed, as to whether he has magnetism to run in at all.  Nothing could be more unscientific than the process and the result.