As to the electric street railway, perhaps a few facts relative to Massachusetts may indicate a state of affairs that to some extent is typical now of the section, and will become more so as population in New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont drifts townward. From 1860 to 1889, the number of street-railway companies in Massachusetts increased only from twenty to forty-six, and the mileage from eighty-eight to 574, the motor force of course being horse-power. From 1889 to 1897, the number of companies increased from forty-six to ninety-three, and the mileage from 547 to 1413, the motor power being almost exclusively electric. During the same period, the number of passengers carried on the ten main lines increased from 148,189,403 in 1889, to 308,684,224 in 1897. The total capital invested in these street railways now amounts to $63,112,800, and, in 1897, earned 7·78 per cent. on the average. So much for statistics which are impressive in themselves. But if one would appreciate the magnitude of this traffic, and the radical transformation which the new power and improved service have wrought in the life of the people who patronize these railroads, he must do more than compare statistics. He must note the result of making the residence in the suburb and the workshop in the city accessible to a degree that the steam railway cannot expect to duplicate, of giving city dwellers opportunities to journey seaward and hillward at a trifling expense, of providing residents of the villages with inexpensive transportation to the towns and residents of the towns with transportation to the cities, of cultivating the knowledge of and love for open-air life and nature among city dwellers and of enlarging the social horizon and area of observation of the villager, of giving a poor man a vehicle that transports him with a speed and a sense of pleasure that vies with that of the high-priced trotter of the wealthy horseman, of giving to society a centripetal force that tends to take city workers countryward at a time when other social forces, centrifugal in their tendency, are drawing him cityward. Naught would occasion more bewilderment to the ancient residents of Marblehead, Hingham, or Plymouth, could they return to their former places of abode, than the “Broomstick Trains” which Oliver Wendell Holmes’s fancy pictured thus: “On every stick there’s a witch astride,-- The string you see to her leg is tied. She will do a mischief if she can, But the string is held by a careful man, And whenever the evil-minded witch Would cut some caper, he gives a twitch. As for the hag, you can’t see her, But hark! you can hear her black cat’s purr, And now and then, as a car goes by, You may catch a gleam from her wicked eye.”