754 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



It takes its franchises by consent or by ordinance of the lesser mu- 

 nicipal corporations above enumerated tbe aldermen, tlie super- 

 visor, 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 pri- 

 vate 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 negli- 

 gent, 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, dodg- 

 ing 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 ran- 

 sack 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 rail- 

 way 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 Inter- 

 state Commerce Commission, and that terrible "long and short 

 haul " bugaboo which has already wrecked one of our most ma- 



