The street railroad company in the Borough of Brooklyn has just
executed some leases to endure 999 years. Leases of property
have also been made for the same period, though, of course, a
lease of 999 years will be about as binding 999 years from now as
would a lease of the great pyramid executed the day after it was
finished, if such a lease should be presented at present to the
Egyptian Government.
These preposterous leases are interesting because they bring
vividly before the human mind the certainty of wonderful and
splendid changes in human affairs.
The street railroad leases are especially fascinating to the
imaginative mind.
They deal with present conditions and will seem inconceivably
primitive hundreds of years before the leases will have ended.
These leases deal with miserable little electric cars crawling
slowly over the face of the earth, at either end an underpaid,
overworked man, and in the middle a crowd of poor, dissatisfied,
ill-housed human beings.
Nine hundred and ninety-nine years from now the human race will
not by any means have accomplished its destiny. It will still be
struggling on toward the goal of real civilization.
But it will have grown far beyond the savage condition of life
that marks the execution of these long leases.
Before these street railroad leases expire Brooklyn and all other
cities as they now exist will have disappeared from the earth.
Perfect transportation, underground, overground and through the
air, will enable human beings, if they choose, to live as far
from their work as does the seagull or the eagle.
It will no longer be necessary to crowd together in miserable
tenements, and homes will be scattered. Human beings undoubtedly
will dwell in huge, splendidly managed structures, each in the
centre of its own park, far from the noise and the brutality of
modern city life.
Before the leases expire the combined cities of New York and
Brooklyn and Yonkers and Coney Island and Montauk Point will have
grown into an enormous, hideous human aggregation of fifty
million or more human beings.
Even the city of a hundred millions may be seen.
But as that huge, monstrous city will have grown, so it will have
died, as the monsters of former geological epochs grew and died
in their turn.
The site of the vanished great city will be covered with gardens,
and children in schools will be taught that human beings who once
lived in the cliffs in the Far West afterward gathered together
in horrible municipal ant-hills in the East, called cities,
before they learned how to live comfortably. ----
Before those street railroad leases expire the present temporary
mania for money will have run its course.
Once every important man felt that a certain number of slaves
must be murdered at his funeral. Sometimes his favorite horse
was shot. In scores of millions of cases his wife was burned
alive with his corpse. We have outgrown that. Nowadays the
great man who dies must leave behind him an accumulation of
millions, which means that thousands of men have worked to give
him what he did not need. Before these leases shall have expired
that form of financial barbarism will have ceased to exist.
It is reasonable to hope that the coming thousand years will have
seen the end of industrial feudalism, which has had its birth in
our day, and which will run its course as did the military
feudalism of the Middle Ages.
What a marvellous picture the world will present one thousand
years from now!
The earth will be adequately populated.
Science will have conquered disease almost entirely. Each woman
will be the mother of two children. She will not bring five or
six into the world in order that two or three may live.
Competition will be replaced by emulation. The intelligent
servant of government will work as loyally and enthusiastically
for his government and for the people as the boy at college now
works for his college football team.
The human mind will have wandered on many leagues in its search
for a satisfying religion, getting always nearer to a clear
conception of the grandeur of the universe, and further away from
the superstition necessary to the moral control of a brutal
semi-civilization.
Human beings will have learned that the noblest thing one man can
do is to work for others.
Each will gladly contribute all his talent and strength to the
welfare of all.
All will gladly recognize, applaud and richly reward the special
ability of the individual.
There will be no poverty. Willingness to work will insure a
comfortable livelihood. Education will have developed the
average human intellect far beyond our conception. Nine-tenths
of the human race have been able to read only within the past few
years. What will a thousand years of universal education do?
----
The end of the leases of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company will
find many of our problems solved.
It will find, however, the real work of man just beginning. The
abstract work of the intellect, the proper organization of
society as expressed in human passions, the study of the
wonderful and beautiful universe outside of our own little
planet, will then begin with the conquest of our material
conditions.