American lines

“ Between these lines of travel may be read the history of the past two centuries of American commerce, for the vital factors in the development of the nation have been the evolution of transportation 153 and its manifold and far-reaching influence upon the expansion of population and commerce and upon the rise of new industries.
Thus all the rivals in the great contest for the trade of the West speedily reached their goal, New York with the Erie and the New York Central, and Pennsylvania and Maryland with the Pennsylvania and the Baltimore and Ohio. ”

“ At the time of our Revolution the difficulties of [Pg 61] travelling formed an important social obstacle to the union of the states. In our time the persons who pass in a single day between New York and Boston by six or seven distinct lines of railroad and steamboat are numbered by thousands. ”

“ Many masters and mates found themselves ashore without work, forced to take employment at whatever tasks they could get. But new lines did make their way, and most of the experienced lines managed to hold on, even going into new fields, as the practical elimination of the German lines gave them some opportunity to do. And following the war, American ships became known in ports where the American flag had not been seen for a generation or more. ”

“ Every new railway is a muscle of iron knitting together the joints of the Union, and no other nation has a railway service equal to that of America. Railways span the continent from New York to the Golden Gate. The traveler retires to rest in the North and wakes up in the sunny South. And still he can journey on in his own country, under the American flag, day after day, if he wishes, toward the setting sun, unvexed by custom house, and free from the inquisition which attends the stranger in Europe, as he flits from one petty State to another. ”

“ Enormous trains, enormous waggons, with beds and lavatories, and negroes who brush you with a big broom, as if they were grooming a horse. A bounding movement, a roaring noise, a crowd of people who look horribly tired, a boy who passes up and down throwing pamphlets and sweetmeats into your lap—that is an American journey. There are windows in the waggons—enormous, like everything else; but there is nothing to see. The country is a void—no features, no objects, no details, nothing to show you that you are in one place more than another. ”

“ The Empire State, as you love to call it, was once laced by our trails from Albany to Buffalo – trails that we had trod for centuries – trails worn so deep by the feet of the Iroquois that they became your roads of travel, as your possessions gradually eat into those of my people. Your roads still traverse those same lines of communication which bound one part of the Long House to the other. ”

“ On the dullest faces of the steerage a new light falls as the American gateway is entered. We shall not comprehend the element that are shaping and are to shape our destiny, without due realization of the immigrant's dream.
With the passing of the frontier, Western social and political ideals took new form. ”

“ The "See America First" idea, which originated as the advertising catch line of a western railroad, deserves serious consideration, not only because of what America has to offer in the way of scenery, but also because of what she has to offer in the way of people. I found that a great many thoughtful persons all over the United States were considering this point. ”

“ The great enterprise of connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific States by railways and telegraph lines has been entered upon with a vigor that gives assurance of success, notwithstanding the embarrassments arising from the prevailing high prices of materials and labor. ”

“ There was a notable change in the popular attitude toward road making after the war, and all public-spirited men now saw in better means of communication an instrument for the establishing of American supremacy over the western continent. Legislatures made generous appropriations for highways. An active migration set in from New York and northern Pennsylvania to the West. ”

“ Even with all other conditions favorable, it is doubtful if the American Union could have been preserved to the present time without the railroad. Railroads and telegraphs have made our vast country, both for political and for social purposes, more snug and compact than little Switzerland was in the middle ages or New England a century ago. ”

“ But I hasten to speak of the utility of these improvements in creating an American sentiment. An unlooked for consequence of the railroad, is the increased acquaintance it has given the American people with the boundless resources of their own soil. ”

“ The general arguments in favor of inland navigation, apply with peculiar force to the United States, and most emphatically to this state. A geographical view of the country, will at once demonstrate the unexampled prosperity that will arise from our cultivating the advantages which nature has dispensed with so liberal a hand. A great chain of mountains passes through the United States, and divides them into eastern and western America. ”

“ To turn from the social to the material features of the United States: their system of internal communication deserves a brief notice, for by it their resources have been developed to a prodigious extent. The system of railways, telegraphs, and canal and river navigation presents an indication of the wealth and advancement of the United States, as wonderful as any other feature of her progress. ”

“ The construction of three transcontinental lines of railway, all in successful operation, wholly within our territory, and uniting the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, has been accompanied by results of a most interesting and impressive nature, and has created new conditions, not in the routes of commerce only, but in political geography, which powerfully affect our relations toward and necessarily increase our interests in any transisthmian route which may be opened and employed for the ends of peace and traffic, or, in other contingencies, for uses inimical to both. ”

“ Throughout our history, there have been times when a generation of Americans seized the chance to remake the face of this nation. It's what we did in the midst of civil war by connecting our coasts with a transcontinental railroad. ”

“ I. No line should be allowed to land on the shores of the United States under the concession from another power which does not admit the right of any other line or lines, formed in the United States, to land and freely connect with and operate through its land lines. ”

“ Then when you see that the Metropolitan Railway of London is managed by a man from Chicago, and that all trains of "the underground" are being equipped with the Edison incandescent light; and you note further that a New York man has morganized the transatlantic steamship-lines, you agree with William T. Stead that, "America may be raw and crude, but she is producing a race of men—men of power, who can think and act." ”

“ When one bears in mind the fact that this road is the main artery connecting one hundred and twenty millions of people at one end with over two hundred millions at the other, this seems amazing; but still more so when one considers that in the United States, with a population of, say, eighty millions in all, we have five great trunk-lines across the continent, each running large express-trains several times a day. ”

“ But the Englishman retorts with some reference to an American railroad wreck and we shut up. I have learned this summer that while the United States is the greatest country on earth, it can still learn lessons from the slow-but-sure-going English, the sturdy Germans and the energetic French. One of these lessons is that fast trains and fine cars ought to be supplemented by solid roadbeds and careful watching. ”

“ The long thin line of rails connected the East with a West now swiftly grown mightier than itself. All American morals and manners underwent swift reconstruction. The United States, plus California, plus the Western railways, became a different nation.
It is not necessary to take up in detail the chronological or geographical study of the building of the transcontinental railways. They have done their work. The commercial history of America is sufficiently well written to-day on the face of every country of the globe. ”

“ Far-sighted men of capital and public spirit saw something of what railroads were to be, and soon the iron way began to connect the great cities of the Atlantic together, and then these with the interior of the New England and Middle States, until at last the continent has been belted, and the distant mining-camps of the Rocky Mountains, and the broad stretches of the Californian and Texan plains, are directly connected with every city and town in the country. ”

“ The case is not unlike that which confronted us when our own continent was to be opened up to settlement and industry, and we needed long lines of railway, extended means of transportation prepared beforehand, if development was not to lag intolerably and wait interminably. ”

“ How can the great West be held and made to strengthen the Union? France and England had owned and lost it. Could the new master, this infant Republic, "one nation to-day, thirteen to-morrow," do better? Ay, but England and France had no seer or adviser so wise as this man. This letter from Washington to Harrison was our nation's pioneer call to the vastly better days (poor as they now seem) of improved river navigation, the first splendid economic advance that heralded the day of the canal and the national highway. ”

“ Can you ticket every passenger through to San Francisco—to Oakland—to Sacramento—even to Virginia City? Shall not the route be represented as well as the termini? And where our people travel, that is the highway of our thought. Will the trains be freighted only with merchandize, and shall we exchange nothing but goods? Will not our civilization gain by the subtle inflowing current of Eastern refinement, and shall we not, by the same channel, throw into Eastern exclusiveness something of our own breadth and liberality? ”

“ The westward movement was begun, as we have seen, not by foreigners but by American farmers and settlers from seaboard and back country, thousands of whom, before the dawn of the nineteenth century, packed their household goods and families into covered wagons and followed the sunset trail. ”

“ I see the strength of America in that tide of population which spreads over the prairies of the West, and, beating on the Rocky Mountains, dashes its peaceful spray to the very shores of the Pacific sea. Had we taken 150,000 men and $200,000,000, and built two railroads across the continent, that would have been a worthy sign of the nation's strength. ”

“ The evidence of the American railways, then, suggests very strongly what a hundred other signs confirm, that the huge classless sea of American population is not destined to remain classless, is already developing separations and distinctions and structures of its own. ”

“ We may metaphorically call the civilized nations the “brain” of humanity, and we may say that the United States has become an independent lobe of the cortex in the course of the last forty years. In the same way it was only lately, I understand, that your President spoke of railways as the arteries through which the blood of trade is circulating. ”

“ The two are now bound indissolubly together by lines of railroad, which, during a part of the year, are the most convenient outlet of the West toward the sea. Those States, just as they are arriving at a controlling influence in the affairs of a great and powerful nation, are hardly likely to seclude themselves from the rest of the world in what would, from its position, be at best an insignificant republic. ”

“ The Pacific Mail Line to the East, the Pacific Railroad across the continent, the superb government buildings at Washington,—all constructed, in whole or in part, while the nation seemed to be strained to its utmost by the demands of a civil war,—these things are to me among the mightiest evidences of the faith of the men of those days who, while the present seemed to be surcharged with duties and burdens for their hands, still laid hold upon the future with such powerful grasp. Are we, of the Chamber of Commerce, worthy of the blessings that have come down to us out of the glorious past? ”

“ Many things have combined to bring about such a desirable change, the principal, in my opinion, being the railroads which have penetrated and transformed the great American continent, placing comforts and luxuries within reach of officers and men, and absorbing more of their pay as well as bringing them within touch of civilization and its attendant restraints. ”

“ What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history. ”

“ But the whole boundless continent is ours.” Yet it cannot be ignored that no other nation has such a magnificent career of expansion, development, and progress before it as the United States, united as it is by telegraph and telephone and our vast network of railways, from the Atlantic 821to the Pacific, and Maine to Florida, in unbroken continuity. ”

“ The route of your improvement is directly on the line that would be most desirable for a railroad to pass from St. Louis, or the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, through the center of the wealth and enterprise of the Mississippi valley to the Atlantic. With a map of the Union before you, it will be found to be impossible to draw a line upon it that would accommodate so large an amount of population, or an equal extent of fertile country. ”

“ But the country grew, rapid transit was established, and trade and commerce between the States got to be so much greater than before, that the power of the National government became more felt and recognized and, therefore, had to be enlisted in the cause of this institution. ”