What a traffic problem is here opened to this world; so immense that it puts to blush the power of that horrid wizard who would remove our railways. Its conception is no more impossible than that of broadcasting. Even in so remote a village as Camberley (thirty miles distant from London, and there I write), where electrical genius is conspicuously absent, I can switch on to Paris and listen to Galli Curci or any other human bird. And what appears to me far more marvellous, simultaneously a fisherman in Trondhjem can do likewise. An immense audience in fact this Galli Curci can command, and totally unknown to her, totally unseen and out of contact even with itself, a dust of individuals, each speck of which can travel on or off her song by mere pressure of the hand, each speck of which can travel by ear at infinite speed and to any civilized point on the globe. If this is not magic, what is? If song can be etherealized, why not then the singer? How much more remarkable would it not be, in place of scanning bold headlines of dead workmen and deposited babies, to read that Melba will sing in New York, at a quarter past three next Saturday afternoon, and at the Opera House in Paris, that very same day, and but twenty minutes later. If we can transmit one thing, surely the day must soon come when we shall be able to transmit all things, and my genius John Smith is the man of that day. What could he not do? He could solve the traffic problem in Regent Street or Broadway, for all, astonished reader, you would have to do would be to sit on a transmitter, press a button, and in the minutest fraction of a second, you would find yourself in Peter Robinson’s, or Mr. Morgan’s office, or wherever you wanted to go, all for a penny or a couple of cents! He could banish the Communists to the moon, where there are no capitalists and where there is plenty of ice to keep their heads cool. He could replace the League of Nations by a row of chairs. The Grenadier Guards would fall in to the stentorian yells of their Sergeant-Major to be seated. The button would be pressed by the Army Council and, in less than a twinkle of an eye, they would be doing their famous goose-step down the Sieges Alle, to the utter consternation of the terrible Teuton. Dear and crawling reader, what could he not do, and what could not you do? Half-a-crown, or half-a-dollar, would take you round the world—bag, baggage and all. And if you do not forget your purse, you can breakfast in New York at a cafeteria, lunch with Ongo-Pongo on the shores of Lake Chad, have tea in Yoshiwara, at the “Nectarine” for choice, and sup with Doris in the Bois de Boulogne at 8.30—this, indeed, is to live.