outer world and eager to take advantage of the latest discoveries of men of science. Nor is it imprudent to assert that such a study made in the average New England town will indicate economic wants, and their satisfaction, such as no communities elsewhere can display. Compared with other sections of the country, New England has railroads which are better supervised by the States, more honestly constructed, capitalized and administered, and more responsive to public needs. Concentration of power and responsibility in the hands of the few goes on apace in New England, as well as elsewhere, so that now there are only four railway corporations of much importance in New England. But, through such governmental agents as the Massachusetts Board of Railroad Commissioners (organized in 1869, and the model for similar bodies elsewhere in the nation), the people still retain the whip-hand, still protect the rights of individuals, communities, and investors, and bring about those reductions in fare and freight charges, and those improvements in service, which public welfare and safety demand. No attempt--however brief or superficial--to describe the life of the New England town of the last decade of the nineteenth century, especially in the States of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, could justifiably fail to note the transformation--economic, physical, and social--which the bicycle and trolley electric railroad have wrought in the life of the towns of those States. New England capitalists and New England inventors were the first to put on the market safety bicycles that were well constructed, adapted for daily use or pleasure, and reasonably cheap, and New England still retains the lead in the domestic and export trade in bicycles. Naturally, then, New England people were the first to purchase the product of their own factories. Space does not suffice to indicate here how general now is the use of the bicycle even in the remotest hamlets, and how it has changed modes of living. Farmers’ boys and girls among the lakes and hills of Maine and Vermont, fishermen’s children on the sand-dunes of Cape Cod, run their errands, visit their neighbors, and get their daily sport with the bicycle. Artisans and professional men in all the towns and cities go to and from their shops, offices, and homes on steeds that require no fodder, and while doing it gain physical exercise and mental exhilaration that transportation in the old ways never furnished. Horses still are in demand for sport and draught work, and the few who love horses continue to breed and own them. But for the multitude a far cheaper and more tractable kind of steed has come, one which rivals the locomotive as well as the horse and forces steam-railway managers to face serious problems, mechanical and fiscal.