The Great Stone of Sardis | Page 3

number. Many people walked across the bridge, taking their exercise, while
some who were out for the air and the sake of the view walked in the direction opposite
to that in which the platform was moving, thus lengthening the pleasant trip.
At the great elevator over the old Battery many passengers went down and many came up,
but the wide platforms still moved to the east and moved to the west, never stopping or
changing their rate of speed.
Roland Clewe remained on the bridge until he had reached its western end, far out on the
old Jersey flats, and there he took a car of the suspended electric line, which would carry
him to his home, some fifty miles in the interior. The rails of this line ran along the top of
parallel timbers, some twenty feet from the ground, and below and between these rails the
cars were suspended, the wheels which rested on the rails being attached near the top of
the car. Thus it was impossible for the cars to run off the track; and as their bottoms or
floors were ten or twelve feet from the ground, they could meet with no dangerous
obstacles. In consequence of the safety of this structure, the trains were run at a very high
speed.
Roland Clewe was a man who had given his life, even before he ceased to be a boy, to
the investigation of physical science and its applications, and those who thought they
knew him called him a great inventor; but he, who knew himself better than any one else
could know him, was aware that, so far, he had not invented anything worthy the power
which he felt within himself.

After the tidal wave of improvements and discoveries which had burst upon the world at
the end of the nineteenth century there had been a gradual subsidence of the waters of
human progress, and year by year they sank lower and lower, until, when the twentieth
century was yet young, it was a common thing to say that the human race seemed to have
gone backward fifty or even a hundred years.
It had become fashionable to be unprogressive. Like old furniture in the century which
had gone out, old manners, customs, and ideas had now become more attractive than
those which were modern and present. Philosophers said that society was retrograding,
that it was becoming satisfied with less than was its due; but society answered that it was
falling back upon the things of its ancestors, which were sounder and firmer, more simple
and beautiful, more worthy of the true man and woman, than all that mass of harassing
improvement which had swept down upon mankind in the troubled and nervous days at
the end of the nineteenth century.
On the great highways, smooth and beautiful, the stage-coach had taken the place to a
great degree of the railroad train; the steamship, which moved most evenly and with less
of the jarring and shaking consequent upon high speed, was the favored vessel with ocean
travellers. It was not considered good form to read the daily papers; and only those
hurried to their business who were obliged to do so in order that their employers might
attend to their affairs in the leisurely manner which was then the custom of the business
world.
Fast horses had become almost unknown, and with those who still used these animals a
steady walker was the favorite. Bicycles had gone out as the new century came in, it
being a matter of course that they should be superseded by the new electric vehicles of
every sort and fashion, on which one could work the pedals if he desired exercise, or sit
quietly if his inclinations were otherwise, and only the very young or the intemperate
allowed themselves rapid motion on their electric wheels. It would have been considered
as vulgar at that time to speed over a smooth road as it would have been thought in the
nineteenth century to run along the city sidewalk.
People thought the world moved slower; at all events, they hoped it would soon do so.
Even the wiser revolutionists postponed their outbreaks. Success, they believed, was fain
to smile upon effort which had been well postponed.
Men came to look upon a telegram as an insult; the telephone was preferred, because it
allowed one to speak slowly if he chose. Snap-shot cameras were found only in the
garrets. The fifteen minutes' sittings now in vogue threw upon the plate the color of the
eyes, hair, and the flesh tones of the sitter. Ladies wore hoop skirts.
But these days of passivism at last passed by; earnest thinkers had not believed in them;
they knew they were simply reactionary, and could not last;