In the
cleansing country air the slum cannot exist. Improvement in road-
beds and the means of locomotion, a tremor of altruism, a little
legislation, and the city by day will sleep in the country by night.
What a play-ball has this planet of ours become! Steam has made its
parts accessible and drawn them closer together. The telegraph
annihilates space and time. Each morning every part knows what every
other part is thinking, contemplating, or doing. A discovery in a
German laboratory is being demonstrated in San Francisco within
twenty-four hours. A book written in South Africa is published by
simultaneous copyright in every English-speaking country, and on the
following day is in the hands of the translators. The death of an
obscure missionary in China, or of a whisky smuggler in the South
Seas, is served up, the world over, with the morning toast. The
wheat output of Argentine or the gold of Klondike is known wherever
men meet and trade. Shrinkage or centralization has been such that
the humblest clerk in any metropolis may place his hand on the pulse
of the world.
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