Leases of property
have also been made for the same period, though, of course, a
lease of 999 years will be about as binding 999 years from now as
would a lease of the great pyramid executed the day after it was
finished, if such a lease should be presented at present to the
Egyptian Government.
These preposterous leases are interesting because they bring
vividly before the human mind the certainty of wonderful and
splendid changes in human affairs.
The street railroad leases are especially fascinating to the
imaginative mind.
They deal with present conditions and will seem inconceivably
primitive hundreds of years before the leases will have ended.
These leases deal with miserable little electric cars crawling
slowly over the face of the earth, at either end an underpaid,
overworked man, and in the middle a crowd of poor, dissatisfied,
ill-housed human beings.
Nine hundred and ninety-nine years from now the human race will
not by any means have accomplished its destiny. It will still be
struggling on toward the goal of real civilization.
But it will have grown far beyond the savage condition of life
that marks the execution of these long leases.
Before these street railroad leases expire Brooklyn and all other
cities as they now exist will have disappeared from the earth.
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