han that of any other servant. Unwittingly, then, the electrical
engineer is a political reformer of high degree, for he puts a new
premium upon ability and justice at the City Hall. His sole condition is
that electricity shall be under control at once competent and honest.
Let us hope that his plea, joined to others as weighty, may quicken the
spirit of civic righteousness so that some of the richest fruits ever
borne in the garden of science and art may not be proffered in vain.
Flame, the old-time servant, is individual; electricity, its successor
and heir, is collective. Flame sits upon the hearth and draws a family
together; electricity, welling from a public source, may bind into a
unit all the families of a vast city, because it makes the benefit of
each the interest of all.

But not every promise brought forward in the name of the electrician has
his assent or sanction. So much has been done by electricity, and so
much more is plainly feasible, that a reflection of its triumphs has
gilded many a baseless dream. One of these is that the cheap electric
motor, by supply power at home, will break up the factory system, and
bring back the domestic manufacturing of old days. But if this power
cost nothing at all the gift would leave the factory unassailed; for we
must remember that power is being steadily reduced in cost from year to
year, so that in many industries it has but a minor place among the
expenses of production. The strength and profit of the factory system
lie in its assembling a wide variety of machines, the first delivering
its product to the second for another step toward completion, and so on
until a finished article is sent to the ware-room. It is this minute
subdivision of labour, together with the saving and efficiency that
inure to a business conducted on an immense scale under a single
manager, that bids us believe that the factory has come to stay. To be
sure, a weaver, a potter, or a lens-grinder of peculiar skill may thrive
at his loom or wheel at home; but such a man is far from typical in
modern manufacture. Besides, it is very questionable whether the
lamentations over the home industries of the past do not ignore evil
concomitants such as still linger in the home industries of the
present--those of the sweater's den, for example.

This rapid survey of what electricity has done and may yet do--futile
expectation dismissed--has shown it the creator of a thousand material
resources, the perf