Let us picture to ourselves another magician descending on this earth of
ours, a man of magic with the prosaic name of John Smith, yet none the
less a man of genius, for all such are magicians in very fact. He is a
very modern genius, and, I will suppose that he has discovered how to
transform any and all physical things into ether waves moving at 186,000
miles a second, and that he can precipitate in its original form any
article or being sent to any given spot; all this arrived at by tapping
a key or pressing a button.
What a traffic problem is here opened to this world; so immense that it
puts to blush the power of that horrid wizard who would remove our
railways. Its conception is no more impossible than that of
broadcasting. Even in so remote a village as Camberley (thirty miles
distant from London, and there I write), where electrical genius is
conspicuously absent, I can switch on to Paris and listen to Galli Curci
or any other human bird. And what appears to me far more marvellous,
simultaneously a fisherman in Trondhjem can do likewise. An immense
audience in fact this Galli Curci can command, and totally unknown to
her, totally unseen and out of contact even with itself, a dust of
individuals, each speck of which can travel on or off her song by mere
pressure of the hand, each speck of which can travel by ear at infinite
speed and to any civilized point on the globe. If this is not magic,
what is?
If song can be etherealized, why not then the singer? How much more
remarkable would it not be, in place of scanning bold headlines of dead
workmen and deposited babies, to read that Melba will sing in New York,
at a quarter past three next Saturday afternoon, and at the Opera House
in Paris, that very same day, and but twenty minutes later.
If we can transmit one thing, surely the day must soon come when we
shall be able to transmit all things, and my genius John Smith is the
man of that day. What could he not do? He could solve the traffic
problem in Regent Street or Broadway, for all, astonished reader, you
would have to do would be to sit on a transmitter, press a button, and
in the minutest fraction of a second, you would find yourself in Peter
Robinson’s, or Mr. Morgan’s office, or wherever you wanted to go, all
for a penny or a couple of cents! He could banish the Communists to the
moon, where there are no capitalists and where there is plenty of ice to
keep their heads cool. He could replace the League of Nations by a row
of chairs. The Grenadier Guards would fall in to the stentorian yells of
their Sergeant-Major to be seated. The button would be pressed by the
Army Council and, in less than a twinkle of an eye, they would be doing
their famous goose-step down the Sieges Alle, to the utter consternation
of the terrible Teuton.
Dear and crawling reader, what could he not do, and what could not you
do? Half-a-crown, or half-a-dollar, would take you round the world—bag,
baggage and all. And if you do not forget your purse, you can breakfast
in New York at a cafeteria, lunch with Ongo-Pongo on the shores of Lake
Chad, have tea in Yoshiwara, at the “Nectarine” for choice, and sup with
Doris in the Bois de Boulogne at 8.30—this, indeed, is to live.
But what would you do—you beefsteak-eating bull of a Briton, yes, what
would you do? You would don your lounge suit or your morning coat, or
your tuxedo, as your great grandfathers did right back in 1825. You
would become thoroughly traditional and would say: “Why, this man is
mad—a raving lunatic! Send me to Lake Chad?... Good God, man, what is he
thinking about ... Lock him up!”
Then the storm would burst. The leading engineers, “eminent” as they are
called by every newspaper, would say it was contrary to etheric law;
Harley Street would be thoroughly up in arms, for all their old lady
friends might suddenly betake themselves in a second to Madeira and get
cured of their ailments; the physicians would say the human frame cannot
stand this rush; the bath-chairmen would say that their occupation was
gone; the lawyers would say it was illegal and that it would lead to the
Cocos Islands becoming a refuge for criminals; the soldiers would say,
how could they be expected to protect this dash dashed land, why, it did
not fit their strategy, therefore it _must_ be wrong. And what would the
clergy say? Heaven alone knows, for whilst antiquity and things
antiquated separate the Churches, any novelty of a progressive nature is
apt to bring them together with amazing unanimity.
The reader may be beginning to think that I, the writer, am off my head,
but I am not. So far, all I have done is to reveal protean
possibilities, now I will turn to actualities of the same psychological
order. I will imagine that this genius Mr. Smith has, in disgust,
removed himself to Aldebaran, and that we are about to get back to the
Brusselton Incline.