"Of course, after a decision like this, concentration of inhabitants was out of the question. Every pulpit in Sybaris blazed with sermons on the text, 'Every man shall sit under his vine and under his fig-tree.' Everybody saw that a house without its own garden was an abomination, and easy communication with the suburbs was a necessity.
"It was, indeed, easy enough to show, as the city engineer did, that the power wasted in lifting people up, and, for that matter, down stairs, in a five-story house, in one day, would carry all those people I do not know how many miles on a level railroad track in less time. What you call horse-railroads, therefore, became a necessity."
I said they made a great row with us.
"Yes," said he, "I saw they did. With us the government owns and repairs the track, as you do the track of any common road. We never have any difficulty.
"You see," he added after a pause, "with us, if a conductor sprains the ankle of a citizen, it is a matter the state looks after. With you, the citizen must himself be the prosecutor, and virtually never is. Did you notice a pretty winged Mercury outside the station-house you came to?"
I had noticed it.
"That was put up, I don't know how long ago, in the infancy of these things. They took a car off one night, without public notice beforehand. One old man was coming in on it, to his daughter's wedding. He missed his connection out at Little Krastis, and lost half an hour. Down came the Kategoros. The company had taken from a citizen what they could not restore, namely, half an hour."
George lighted another cigar, and laughed very heartily. "That's a great case in our reports," he said. "The company ventured to go to trial on it. They hoped they might overturn the old decisions, which were so old that nobody knows when they were made,—as old as the dancing horses," said he, laughing. "They said time was not a thing,—it was a relation of ideas; that it did not exist in heaven; that they could not be made to suffer because they did not deliver back what no man ever saw, or touched, or tasted. What was half an hour? But the jury was pitiless. A lot of business men, you know,—they knew the value of time. What did they care for the metaphysics? And the company was bidden to put up an appropriate statue worth ten talents in front of their station-house, as a reminder to all their people that a citizen's time was worth something."
This was George's first visit to me; and it was the first time, therefore, that I observed a queer thing. Just at this point he rose rather suddenly and bade me good evening. I begged him to stay, but had to repeat my invitation twice. His hand was on the handle of the door before he turned back. Then he sat down, and we went on talking; but before long he did the same thing again, and then again.
At last I was provoked, and said: "What is the custom of your country? Do you have to take a walk every eleven minutes and a quarter?"