Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/774

754 It takes its franchises by consent or by ordinance of the lesser municipal corporations above enumerated—the aldermen, the supervisor, the adjoining proprietors; who, lesser in place, are also lesser in appetite and cormorant capabilities. It escapes all but the local "heeler" and "striker." It needs no private funds or private pass-books; no discretionary accounts, except for the smaller appetites. Then, too, when the percentage of accident occurs, the losses are smaller and the damages more minute. The million-dollar disaster and the bankrupting cataclysm are impossibilities to them. Whether the trolley will always escape, as it appears at present to have escaped, the writer for the public press, who at every accident knows just what should have been done to avoid it, just wherein the corporation was criminal or criminally negligent, parsimonious, greedy of gain as estimating income beyond human life or limb, and so on, remains for demonstration. But for the present the trolley's strength, like a woman's, is in her weakness. She sings along her delicate wires, overcoming every obstacle, legal, natural, mechanical, temporal, and practical, dodging every expense, and, best of all, gathers in the ready nickels of everybody and his wife, while her laborious sister, the railway, must pose and turn and make rebates and special rates and ransack the catalogue of inducements if haply she may capture the more infrequent quarters and halves and dollars. With all these, it would seem to be at least common fairness on the part of the cadet of the transportation family to let her elder sister remain monopolist of long-distance traveling and freight transportation which makes her to live. But no! This ambitious young lady has already for long been flirting with freight problems, and has actually projected, incorporated, and capitalized lines ("systems" she probably has already learned to call them) between great centers like New York, Baltimore, and Washington, the carrying of mails and doubtless of our high-priced legislators (which latter will demand the vestibule, the buffet, and parlor and slumber cars, with all that these imply).

The truth is that the trolley is the coming parallel of the railway as to everything in the catalogue. Not even the protests of a nation could keep her off the sacred soil of Gettysburg. She goes where she will. She has even—if the newspapers are veracious—been "held up" in true railway style. Indeed, I foresee nothing that the trolley can not do and nothing that she will not attempt.

With her ambition, however, will come certain disabilities. When she crosses State lines and becomes of interstate dignity, she must not expect immunity from that terrible pigeonholer of freight schedules at Washington, our old mother antic the Interstate Commerce Commission, and that terrible "long and short haul" bugaboo which has already wrecked one of our most