Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/372

358 on an average five hours. Long ago the Western Union Telegraph Company connected its Madison Square branch with its headquarters on Dey Street: written messages are transmitted through its cylinders, two and a half inches in diameter, at the rate of a mile a minute. The tube in its course connects with three branch offices in Broadway—a hint for the pneumatic connection of branch post-offices with the general Post-Office, which, extended to the principal railway stations and ferry-houses in the metropolitan district, would give the postal service a new efficiency. More important than this pneumatic tubing is the question of rapid passenger transit, the inadequacy of existing methods being peculiarly impressive as the great exhibition of 1892 is discussed. Whether by tunnel or viaduct, it seems imperative that New York, at an early day, shall provide itself with transit facilities such as those of the German capital, where trains stopping at all stations, and trains running at high speed stopping only at the principal stations, run on separate sets of tracks.

This continent is, after all, only a larger kind of island, and increase of transatlantic travel has been needed to remove some of its insular complacencies, especially that with which it has hitherto regarded the condition of its streets.

In common with New York, every city and large town in America requires what may be called integration—a thoroughly comprehensive and intelligently planned outlay of capital for every means of welding it into a unit commodious, wholesome, and pleasant to live in; easy and cheap to get about in. There is an art of city design as well as house design: modern house planning not only bestows new comforts and refinements, it makes them all part and parcel of a whole. When cities and towns are treated structurally exactly as a good architect treats the edifice an unstinting capitalist asks him to create, life in them will be much better worth having than it is. And the financial opportunity to do all this appears when New York can borrow money at two and a half per cent—a rate one half as much as her citizens are obliged to pay for individual borrowings. What has been said with regard to cities and towns applies equally to means of communication between them and villages—the common roads, whose badness Prof. Shaler tells us imposes a tax of at least ten dollars a year on the average American household. Road improvement offers scope and verge for the profitable and safe investment of a good many millions now idle.Passing from matters of municipal and county administration to State and national interests, does not cheap and abundant capital make it possible to conserve the Adirondacks as a State park, and as the source of the principal rivers of New York; to establish a national system of afforestation; to reclaim the arid plains of the