“And we have legislators and bosses who sell offices, and ambitious incapables who buy them,” answered the professor. “And we are having now the same vast accumulations of fortune in individual hands that have ever proven the forerunners of national destruction elsewhere. Wealth, corruption, weakness, decay, the mob, and the despot have been the six stages of national life with other republics, and I doubt whether by harnessing steam and electricity to our chariot we shall do more than expedite the journey.”
“Professor, you should go out as a missionary to millionaires,” interposed the doctor, “and preach to them the doctrines of nationalism.”
“Doctor, you are satirical,” replied the professor, “but I am not so sure that events are not fast making missionaries of some such doctrine. Certainly the pressing problem of the hour is that of dealing wisely and justly with the new and unparalleled conditions which vast wealth has created throughout the world, and especially in these United States.”
“We shall prove equal to the problem,” said the doctor cheerfully. “A people who, North and South, were adequate to the achievements and sacrifices of our Civil War, will never allow their government to be overturned by a mob, or their politics to be always ruled by a few thousand wealth owners. And then the personnels of the pauper and the capitalist are ever changing. We have no law of entail by which the founder of a fortune can perpetuate it in his descendants. The vices and the brainlessness of the sons of rich men will come to our aid, and in the third or fourth generation the boatman’s oar and the peddler’s pack will be resumed. Let the millionaires add to their millions without molestation, say I. They cannot take their gold away with them. It must remain here, where it will again be distributed.”
“Doctor,” said the professor solemnly.
“Now, John,” interrupted the doctor, laying his hand familiarly on his friend’s shoulder, “possibly the country may be going to ruin, but we shall have time to see the race out. They are bringing the locomotives in line ready to start. If they should come out close together at the end, how are they going to tell which wins?”
“The judge of this race, doctor,” explained the professor, “is electrical and automatic and cannot make a mistake. As soon as the engines are arranged in line for starting, a wire will be stretched across the track behind them. This wire will connect with a registering apparatus, dial, and clock in front of the grand stand, and each track is numbered. At the signal bell for starting, the clockwork will be put in motion. The first locomotive that crosses this wire will, in the act of crossing, telegraph the number of its track, close the circuit, and stop the clock, thus registering the number of minutes, seconds, and quarter seconds consumed in the run.”
“How clever!” said the doctor. “Well, there sounds the signal bell—they are off!”
With a shrill shriek of challenge from their throats of steel, like unleashed hounds the giants bounded away, gaining speed as they ran. In thirty-eight seconds they rounded the curve by the half-mile post without much change in their relative positions. The next mile was made in fifty-five seconds, with the Chauncey M. Depew, which had the inside track, fifty yards ahead of the Collis P. Huntington, and the others all the way from fifty to one hundred yards behind. At the third mile post the Huntington and the Depew rounded the curve almost side by side, with trails of fire streaming from their smoke stacks, and mingling in a luminous cloud, which hovered above their distanced competitors.
Then, with thunderous leaps and bounds, they came down the home stretch, the one a streak of blue and silver, the other a streak of gold and crimson, and the roar of the multitude fairly drowned the shrieking of the whistles as engineer James Flanagan, of the Southern Pacific Company—his crimson cap gone, his black hair streaming in the wind, and his red flannel shirt open at the breast and almost blown from his massive white shoulders—rode across the signal wire five feet ahead of his competitor, winning the first prize of $10,000 for his company and the diamond badge for himself, making the run of four miles in three minutes nine and one-quarter seconds, or at a rate of over eighty miles an hour.