THE SUCCESSOR OF THE RAILWAY. 759 



will be held to be gross negligence, to be responded for in dam- 

 ages 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 penal- 

 ties 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 trol- 

 ley 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 hos- 

 tility 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 capi- 

 talistsfrom the reign of King Log, as it were, to the reign of 

 King Stork. Whether a time will come when our paternal Gov- 

 ernment 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 Gov- 

 ernment 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 will not be as remorseless a tyrant as the poor superseded railway 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 useful- 

 ness and prosperity ? 



Fkom the circumstances attending the discovery of argon, the Revue Scien- 

 tifique 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 hve by the side of lor a long 

 time, blind to them, because we have not learned to see them. 



