THE VALUE OF LIFE 



of steamboats and railways. The whole problem of 

 transit was revolutionized, and in the last few decades 

 further vast changes have been made owing to the ad- 

 vance of electricity. Modem ideas of time and space 

 are quite different from those of our parents sixty years 

 ago, or our grandparents ninety years ago. In our ex- 

 presses we cover in an hour a stretch of country that 

 the mail-coach took five times and the foot-passenger ten 

 times as long to cover. As the experiments with the 

 Berlin electric railway have lately shown, we can now 

 travel two hundred kilometres in an hour. The journey 

 from Europe to India now takes three weeks, whereas the 

 earlier sailing-vessel took as many months. The im- 

 mense saving of time that we make is equivalent to a 

 lengthening of our own life. This applies also to the 

 more rapid transit provided by balloons, automobiles, 

 bicycles, etc. It is easy to estimate the value of these 

 improvements ; but it is only fully apfjreciated by those 

 who have lived long in an uncivilized country without 

 roads or among savages whose legs are their only means 

 of locomotion. 



This progress in the means of transit is not less 

 valuable socially than personally. If we conceive the 

 state as a unified organism of the higher order, the 

 development of its means of transit corresponds in 

 many ways to that of the circulation of the blood in the 

 vertebrate frame. The easy, rapid, and convenient 

 transport of the means of life from the centre to the 

 most distant parts of the land, and the corresponding 

 development of the net-work of railways and steamboat 

 routes, are to a certain extent direct tests of the degree 

 of civilization. To this we must add the creation of a 

 large number of offices which provide steady employ- 

 ment and means of subsistence for many thousands. 



To compare the complex sensations of civilized man 

 with the much simpler ones of the savage we must 



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