Apropos of the agonies of inded through which Shanghai has been passing in respect to the electric tramway, nothing so strikes one who has been absent from the States for a few years, as the marvellous development of the cities under the fostering influence of the electric tram. is safe to say that no invention within fifty years has so contributed to the amelioration of the conditions of city life as has this of cheap and rapid transit. The humbler workers in the city, shopkeepers, clerks, mechaniex—in fact, every elss outside the ranks of "gizmanity," ever contemptuous of popular vehicles—ate no longer compelled to life-long captivity within the wilderness of bricks and mortar, Tew a'vo may have grass and trees and f+: about. their homes, and pure air unfouled with smoke, and yet live within a half-hour of their work. The city of Boston especially has been utterly—metamorphosed by this change. A half-dozen sequestered districts where as hoys we used to yo gunning in the woods, secure from all danger of interference, uro now already threaded by elec tric lines along whose route suburbs spring. up as if by magic. Nor have they allowed even the overhead trolley to become an eyesore and a nuisance. On all the large boulevards leading out of the city the space given over to the tramway, covered with well-kept turf and lined with a double row of over-arching chus, forms a vista of green down the centre of the avenue, To pass from a city wife this relief has already come to the congested districts, to certain English provincial towns where the workers must still live muid smoke and grime, or spend precious hours crawling behind jaded quadrupeds or a semi-infernal ' dummy" engine, is by comparison to stop back into medievalismn. All of which has its moral for dwellers in a metropolis where the ineffective ricshas are already as the flies of Egypt.
19th January.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.