APRIL 26, 1901.] 
miles of telephone wires have already been 
strung in our own country. Boston, a 
typical city, measures its electric nerves at 
a total of one hundred and seventy million 
feet, and the radius of audible speech from 
it reached a year since, according to Iles, 
to Duluth, Omaha, Kansas City, Little 
Rock and Montgomery. 
Note the saving of time and energy thus 
accomplished. Without leaving his desk 
the manager of a business is in instant com- 
munication with all his employees, and with 
the business enterprises in his own and 
other cities. The captains of industry are 
thus able to command armies of a size un- 
thought ofa few decades since. So accurate 
and instant are the new motor and sensory 
nerves that the oil refineries, the copper 
mines, the steel mills, almost any industry 
that may be mentioned, can be regimented 
under one control, and an industrial revo- 
lution is accomplishing before our eyes. 
The electric wire with the fast mail and 
the newspaper flash the news of the world 
throughout all civilized countries. When 
our army attacks Santiago or marches on 
Pekin, the public becomes impatient of even 
the interval between the morning and the 
afternoon paper. On the night of a national 
election the American public listens to the 
count of votes in every city and in every 
State. The new discovery of science, the 
new mechanical process, the new remedy 
for disease, are communicated without de- 
lay to the entire world. In commerce local 
prices seek the level of the world market, 
and the entire distributing system is as ef- 
fectively controlled as are the capillaries of 
the animal body by the clutches of the 
nerves. In a theater vast as the whole 
earth we look down on the stage upon which 
is played the never-ending drama of current 
history. 
In a still larger sphere the new organ of 
communication has a reflex on civilization. 
It makes possible self-governing commun- 
SCIENCE. 
651 
ities stretching from the Atlantic to the 
Pacific and even the federation of the world. 
Bringing Washington face to face with Lon- 
don, Paris and Berlin, and the other cap- 
itals of Kurope, it enables the great powers 
of two continents to arrange without delay 
a concert of action whose message flashes 
round the planet and is carried into effect 
at Tien Tsin and Pekin. In direct contrast 
unscientific China outspreads her bulk like 
some vast insensate vegetal growth. Under 
attack, even at a vital point, she can neither 
mobilize her armies nor even disseminate 
a knowledge of the danger before it is too 
late. 
It has been said by Giddings that objec- 
tively viewed progress is an increasing in- 
tercourse, a multiplication of relationships, 
an advance in material well-being, a growth 
of population, and an evolution of rational 
conduct. Subjectively it is the expansion 
of the consciousness of kind.* 
In all these respects science has been an 
accelerating force in the evolution of soci- 
ety. Increasing food supply by means of 
scientific agriculture, lengthening life by 
the repression of diseases, and introducing 
a thousand new means of livelihood, it has 
made possible the extraordinary recent 
growth of civilized nations. It permits the 
population of Europe to more than double 
since 1800, and enables England, which in 
the seventeenth century men thought too 
small for its scanty population, to support 
more than 38,000,000 people in comparative 
comfort. It lends some encouragement to 
the sanguine prophecy of Albert Bushnell 
Hart that the Mississippi valley will sooner 
or later contain a population of 350,000,000.7 
At the same time science has produced a 
heterogeneity of structure. The scientific 
principle discovered to-day flowers to-mor- 
row in invention and produces the seeds of 
* ‘Principles of Sociology,’ New York, 1896, p. 359. 
{ ‘The Future of the Mississippi Valley,’ Harper’s 
Mag., Vol. 100, p. 419. 
