I paused momentarily, to pave the way for my next point; and I observed that hundreds of pairs of eyes were straining toward me, in a silence so intense that one might have heard the dropping of the proverbial pin. “I shall not dwell upon the merely physical advantages of my own world,” I continued. “I shall not describe its wide spaces and splendid vistas, its tree-mantled valleys and sun-burnished lakes, its uproarious white-splashed oceans and billowy mountains, dark with forest or glittering with the snow. I shall not linger over the tingling freshness of starry winter nights, the feathery softness of the spring, the enchantment of firefly-haunted glades or of the ever-shifting skies, with their fragile blue or gray or burning sunset red. I shall not discourse upon these sights, for even in the upper world they are but little noted, save by an occasional nature crank or poet. “But what I shall strive to make plain are those advantages familiar to every thinking citizen of the earth. Let me begin, for example, by picturing the life of the typical dweller in our greatest city. Not only in his home but in his work he enjoys the benefits of the most progressive civilization ever known. To begin with, his dwelling may be of any type that accords with his means and capacity, for if he likes high places and can afford them, he may enjoy the privilege of looking down upon his neighbors from the eleventh story; or, if he prefers exercise, he may walk up to the sixth floor whenever he goes home; or, again, if he be of a sluggish disposition, he may take lodgings at street level--and all without extra charge. “Now let me depict the daily routine of such a man. After being aroused in the morning by a wonderful little clock that is almost human in its faithfulness to habit, he slips hastily into his clothes and consumes a breakfast perhaps featured by refrigerated beefsteak grown half a world away, and by coffee mixed with the condensed milk of cows that lived far away and long ago. Having thus fortified himself against the day’s exigencies, he loses no time about leaving the house; and, in company with thousands as fortunate as himself, he enters a little hole in the ground, and twenty minutes or half an hour later emerges from another and precisely similar hole five or ten miles away. But this is the least of his conveniences. After climbing from the second hole, he wedges his way into a little movable electric box in any of our downtown buildings, and promptly finds himself delivered opposite his office on the fifteenth or twentieth floor. He is now ready for the day’s duties; and so marvelously simple is modern civilization that, no matter what those duties be, they are always the same.