Off the Chain

(December, 1910)

I was ill in bed, reading Samuel Warren's "Ten Thousand a Year," and
noting how much the world can change in seventy years.

I had just got to the journey of Titmouse from London to Yorkshire in
that ex-sheriff's coach he bought in Long Acre--where now the motor-cars
are sold--when there came a telegram to bid me note how a certain Mr.
Holt was upon the ocean, coming back to England from a little excursion.
He had left London last Saturday week at midday; he hoped to be back by
Thursday; and he had talked to the President in Washington, visited
Philadelphia, and had a comparatively loitering afternoon in New York.
What had I to say about it?

Firstly, that I wish this article could be written by Samuel Warren. And
failing that, I wish that Charles Dickens, who wrote in his "American
Notes" with such passionate disgust and hostility about the first
Cunarder, retailing all the discomfort and misery of crossing the
Atlantic by steamship, could have shared Mr. Holt's experience.

Because I am chiefly impressed by the fact not that Mr. Holt has taken
days where weeks were needed fifty years ago, but that he has done it
very comfortably, without undue physical exertion, and at no greater
expense, I suppose, than it cost Dickens, whom the journey nearly
killed.

If Mr. Holt's expenses were higher, it was for the special trains and
the sake of the record. Anyone taking ordinary trains and ordinary
passages may do what he has done in eighteen or twenty days.

When I was a boy, "Around the World in Eighty Days" was still a
brilliant piece of imaginative fiction. Now that is almost an invalid's
pace. It will not be very long before a man will be able to go round the
world if he wishes to do so ten times in a year. And it is perhaps
forgivable if those who, like Jules Verne, saw all these increments in
speed, motor-cars, and airships aeroplanes, and submarines, wireless
telegraphy and what not, as plain and necessary deductions from the
promises of physical science, should turn upon a world that read and
doubted and jeered with "I told you so. _Now_ will you respect a
prophet?"

It was not that the prophets professed any mystical and inexplicable
illumination at which a sceptic might reasonably mock; they were
prepared with ample reasons for the things they foretold. Now, quite as
confidently, they point on to a new series of consequences, high
probabilities that follow on all this tremendous development of swift,
secure, and cheapened locomotion, just as they followed almost
necessarily upon the mechanical developments of the last century.

Briefly, the ties that bind men to place are being severed; we are in
the