"Yes; don't you notice that ever since you began to study our advance, what puzzles you most is not the visible details about you, but a changed spirit in people? Thirty years ago, if you showed a man that some one had dumped a ton of soot in his front yard he would have been furious, and had the man arrested and punished. If you showed him that numbers of men were dumping thousands of tons of soot all over his city every year, he would have neither felt nor acted. It's the other way, now."
"You speak as if man had really learned to 'love his neighbor as himself,'" I said sarcastically.
"And why not? If you have a horse, on whose strength you absolutely depend to make a necessary journey, you take good care of that horse and grow fond of him. It dawned on us at last that life was not an individual affair; that other people were essential to our happiness—to our very existence. We are not what they used to call 'altruistic' in this. We do not think of 'neighbors,' 'brothers,' 'others' any more. It is all 'ourself.'"
"I don't follow you—sorry."
Owen grinned at me amiably. "No matter, old chap, you can see results, and will have to take the reasons on trust. Now here's this particular river with its natural beauties, and its unnatural defilements. We simply stopped defiling it—and one season's rain did the rest."
"Did the rains wash away the railroads?"
"Oh, no—they are there still. But the use of electric power has removed the worst evils. There is no smoke, dust, cinders, and a yearly saving of millions in forest fires on the side! Also very little noise. Come and see the way it works now."
"We ran in at Yonkers. I wouldn't have known the old town. It was as beautiful as—Posilippo."
"Where are the factories?" I asked.
"There—and there—and there."