"Please don't interrupt me. These are really serious considerations. Why, Jack, we haven't begun to guess at the wonderful changes that are to be made in all our housekeeping affairs, as well as in everything else by electricity. In a few years we shall find our present cooking arrangements as much out of date as the old turnspit and tin ovens and the great wood fires on the hearth. And light! Our houses will be as light as day all the time, unless we choose darkness in order to sleep more comfortably."
"Or because our deeds be evil, or for the better accommodation of burglars. No self-respecting burglar would think of 'burgling' without a dark lantern."
"And heat; do you remember how something more than twenty-five years ago a French scientist proposed to supply all the heat needed for human comfort in cold climates directly from the sun's rays?"
"I can't say that I do remember that particular philosopher, but I have a notion that the sun was considered a fair sort of furnace a good many years before the first Frenchman was born."
"Yes, yes; but he was going to gather the sun's heat into such shape that it would warm our houses in winter, do all the cooking, take the place of all the steam boilers and furnaces. I never heard that his theories were reduced to practice, but we have found another source of light and heat that is already under our control. There is no more doubt that all the warmth, illumination and mechanical power that we can use are within our reach, when we have learned how to take possession of them, than there is of gravitation. It is all waiting at the door, we have only to clap our hands and the potent spirit is ready to do our bidding."
"Without money and without price?"
"No, not quite that, there are too many incorporated monopolies in the way. But it is coming nearer and nearer, and with the unlimited power of wind and waves and waterfalls, all these things will soon be as cheap as anything really worth having ought to be."
"Say, Jill, do you suppose we shall live to see all our necessities supplied, gratis, and have nothing to work for except the luxuries?"
"We have lived long enough to find that for most people in our day and generation, even for those who think they have to work very hard 'just to get a living,' their most serious toil is to provide, what might be called, not the 'bare' necessities of life, but the well-dressed necessities. But it is time for those children to be in bed."