room for them on the
globe--comfortable standing room. But even though, as it happens, much
of the globe is not very good to stand on, and vast tracts of it,
every year, are going to waste, it matters nothing to us. Every thing
we touch is near or far, or large or small, as we like. As long as a
young woman can sit down by a loom which is as good as six hundred
more just like her, and all in a few square feet--as long as we can do
up the whole of one of Napoleon's armies in a ball of dynamite, or
stable twelve thousand horses in the boiler of an ocean steamer, it
does not make very much difference what kind of a planet we are on, or
how large or small it is. If suddenly it sometimes seems as if it were
all used up and things look cramped again (which they do once in so
often) we have but to think of something, invent something, and let it
out a little. We move over into a new world in a minute. Columbus was
mere bagatelle. We get continents every few days. Thousands of men are
thinking of them--adding them on. Mere size is getting to be
old-fashioned--as a way of arranging things. It has never been a very
big earth--at best--the way God made it first. He made a single spider
that could weave a rope out of her own body around it. It can be
ticked all through, and all around, with the thoughts of a man. The
universe has been put into a little telescope and the oceans into a
little compass. Alice in Wonderland's romantic and clever way with a
pill is become the barest matter of fact. Looking at the world a
single moment with a soul instead of a theodolite, no one who has ever
been on it--before--would know it. It's as if the world were a little
wizened balloon that had been given us once and had been used so for
thousands of years, and we had just lately discovered how to blow it.

III

THE IDEA OF LIBERTY

Some one told me one morning not so very long ago that the sun was
getting a mile smaller across every ten years. It gave me a shut-in
and helpless feeling. I found myself several times during that day
looking at it anxiously. I almost held my hands up to it to warm them.
I knew in a vague fashion that it would last long enough for me. And a
mile in ten years was not much. It did not take much figuring to see
that I had not the slightest reason to be anxious. But my feelings
were hurt. I felt as if something had hit the universe. I could not
get myself--and I have not been able to get myself since--to look a