human
It was, indeed, easy enough to show, as the city engineer did, that the power wasted in lifting people up, and, for that matter, down stairs, in a five-story house, in one day, would carry all those people I do not know how many miles on a level railroad track in less time. What you call horse-railroads, therefore, became a necessity.
gpt
You see, he added after a pause,
human
That was put up, I don't know how long ago, in the infancy of these things. They took a car off one night, without public notice beforehand. One old man was coming in on it, to his daughter's wedding. He missed his connection out at Little Krastis, and lost half an hour. Down came the Kategoros. The company had taken from a citizen what they could not restore, namely, half an hour.
gpt
That's a great case in our reports, he said.
human
The company ventured to go to trial on it. They hoped they might overturn the old decisions, which were so old that nobody knows when they were made,--as old as the dancing horses, said he, laughing.
gpt
They said _time_ was not a thing,--it was a relation of ideas; that it did not exist in heaven; that they could not be made to suffer because they did not deliver back what no man ever saw, or touched, or tasted. What was half an hour? But the jury was pitiless. A lot of business men, you know,--they knew the value of time. What did they care for the metaphysics? And the company was bidden to put up an appropriate statue worth ten talents in front of their station-house, as a reminder to all their people that a citizen's time was worth something.