Then there is the elevator, lift, _ascenseur_. America has had the benefit of this invaluable contrivance for a generation and a half, and it is now used in all our cities and villages, in all hotels, in all lofty business buildings and factories, and in many private dwellings. But we can’t spread it, we can’t beguile Europe with it. In Europe an elevator is even to this day a rarity and a curiosity. Especially a curiosity. As a rule it seats but three or four persons--often only two--and it travels so slowly and cautiously and timorously and piously and solemnly that it makes a person feel creepy and crawly and scary and dismal and repentant. Anybody with sound legs can give the continental elevator two flights the start and beat it to the sixth floor. Every time these nations merely import an American idea, instead of importing the concreted thing itself, the result is a failure. They tried to make the sewing machine, and couldn’t; they are trying to make fountain pens and typewriters and can’t; they are making these dreary elevators, now--and patenting them! Satire can no further go. I think that as a rule we develop a borrowed European idea forward, and that Europe develops a borrowed American idea backward. We borrowed gas lighting and the railroad from England, and the arc light from France, and these things have improved under our culture. We have lent Europe our tramway, telegraph, sewing machine, phonograph, telephone, and kodak, and while we may not claim that in these particular instances she has developed them backward, we are justified in claiming that she has added no notable improvements to them. We have added the improvements ourselves and she has accepted them. Why she has not accepted and universally adopted the improved elevator is a surprising and puzzling thing. Its rightful place is among the great ideas of our great age. It is an epoch maker. It is a concentrator of population, and economizer of room. It is going to build our cities skyward instead of out toward the horizons.[6] It is going to enable five millions of people to live comfortably on the same ground space that one million uncomfortably lives on now. It is going to make cheap quarters for Tom, Dick, and Harry near their work, in place of three miles from it, as is the rule to-day. It is going to save them the necessity of adding a six-flight climb to the already sufficient fatigue of their day’s labor.