Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/779

Rh will be held to be gross negligence, to be responded for in damages on the part of a common carrier who operates his plant by electricity, remains to be seen. With all its advantages and economies even the trolley can not hope to escape all the penalties of success.

To sum it all up, there has suddenly and silently burst upon us an enormous economic agent, and one which, by cheapening the facilities not only of capitalists and manufacturers, but of the least and poorest of consumers, is actually and practically solving those social and agrarian problems which within a few years had threatened serious upheaval in the body politic. With the trolley competing in the field against the railway (selected by the communist as the solid and material symbol of arbitrary power which he should burn and dilapidate and destroy, to assert his popular rights), who shall say that a relief has not come; who shall say but that the railway, with diminished dividends and a divided patronage indeed, may have received from an unexpected quarter immunity from the peril-destroying forces and the hostility of the masses, and at last enjoy its meager surplus of profits over fixed charges, pay roll and maintenance disbursements, in something like peace! Meanwhile the people have been passed from the tender mercies of the larger to those of the smaller capitalists—from the reign of King Log, as it were, to the reign of King Stork. Whether a time will come when our paternal Government will be urged to seize the trolleys and license every one who would operate his own conveyances upon them, remains to be seen. Possibly to the rail way-haters the advent of the trolley has come both as a revelation and an extinguisher! At any rate it has brought them the cheap transportation for which they worried, without the expense of building their own railway coaches, and so a revelation in solving their difficulties with unexpected rapidity. But has it also silenced them? They can not demand that Government seize the railways without seizing the tramways. But have they been emancipated, or only had their masters changed? Who shall guess whether the twentieth-century trolley company will not be as remorseless a tyrant as the poor superseded railway company was alleged to have been in its days of dominant usefulness and prosperity?

the circumstances attending the discovery of argon, the Revue Scientifique draws the lesson that notwithstanding the precision of science, and m spite of all the brilliant discoveries that have been made, there are very s,mp c facts of which we know nothing, and which we may live by the side of for a long time, blind to them, because we have not learned to see them.