UPON the 7th of August, in the year 1807, Robert Fulton, with his little party of anxious and doubting guests on board the “ Claremont,” cast off from the piers of New York, and the waters of the Hudson were first troubled by the strokes of the steam-paddle. There are few Americans at least who have not lingered over the story and shared in the excitement of that famous voyage ; — dwelling upon its every detail from the moment the clumsy little steamer — big with the fate of commercial marines and of navies — left her wharf at New York, until the steeples of Albany shone in the distance. Twenty-two years later the corollary to this great event was worked out in England. Popular biographers have made the world even more familiar with the incidents of this second memorable day than are Americans with the story of Fulton’s voyage. On the 6th of October, 1829, George Stephenson, an ex-stoker and a graduate of the coal-mines of Northumberland, but withal one of the most vigorous intellects which England, rich as she has been in that class of products, has ever given to the world, — upon that day Stephenson drove his little experimental locomotive “The Rocket” from Manchester to Liverpool and back. “The Rocket” weighed only four tons and a quarter, but Stephenson showed that it could move at a rate of thirty miles an hour, and upon that day the modern railroad system was born.
At exactly the same time, in this country, the Cumberland Turnpike and its construction was a fiercely agitated political question. It was part of a great system of internal improvements then contemplated ; and, in identifying himself with it, Henry Clay doubtless thought that he had imperishably connected his memory with a monument more enduring than bronze, — with the Appian Way of America. The ambition was an honorable one ; all human experience justified his faith in the permanence of the foundations upon which he rested it. From a period long before the Christian Era down to the year 1829 there had been no essential change in the system of internal communication. At present, before another half century has yet elapsed, the Cumberland Turnpike is as antiquated as the Appian Way, — as useful, perhaps, but far less interesting.
As to the railroad system, it long ago became impossible exactly to compute the number of miles contained in it or the millions of capital which its construction had cost ; it is very difficult upon either of these points to arrive at conclusions even approximately correct. Neither where the attempt is made is the result at all encouraging. The mind fails to grasp propositions of such magnitude ; the mere piling up of numbers conveys no new idea. For present purposes it may, in round numbers, be said that in 1870 there were about 125,000 miles of railroad in the two hemispheres, constructed at an average cost of little less than $100,000 per mile, and thus representing hardly less than twelve thousand million dollars of invested capital. All this has grown out of the thirty-two miles of road alone in existence just forty years ago.
These figures are certainly sufficiently startling ; but, large as they are, they are increasing at a constantly accelerating rate. Thirty years ago in this country we constructed annually some 500 miles of road ; twenty years ago this amount had increased to 1,500, and as recently as ten years ago, it had scarcely reached 2,000 ; now we build 6,000, and in the year 1871 it is stated that enterprises involving 20,000 miles of road and eight hundred million of dollars are simultaneously going forward to completion.
Though, this material or financial aspect of the system is that which is almost invariably dwelt upon, it is by no means the most interesting one. Here is an enormous, an incalculable force practically let loose suddenly upon mankind ; exercising all sorts of influences, social, moral, and political ; precipitating upon us novel problems which demand immediate solution ; banishing the old before the new is half matured to replace it ; bringing the nations into close contact before yet the antipathies of race have begun to be eradicated ; giving us a history full of changing fortunes and rich in dramatic episodes. Yet, with the curious hardness of a material age, we rarely regard this new power otherwise than as a money-getting and time-saving machine. We know sufficiently well the number of passengers and of tons of freight which the railroad system annually moves ; we know how much it cost, we guess at what it will return ; but not many of those who deal in its securities, or live by means of it, or legislate for it, or who fondly believe they control it, ever stop to think of it as, with perhaps two exceptions, the most tremendous and farreaching engine of social change which has ever either blessed or cursed mankind.
It cannot, therefore, be time wasted to look for a while at the new agent or master from the other point of view, — to consider how it has already affected human interests. Some such discipline is absolutely necessary before any one can be at all fitted to approach the very difficult problems arising out of it which are certainly in store for us, both socially and politically, in our immediate future. Perhaps if the existing community would take now and then the trouble to pass in review the changes it has already witnessed it would be less astounded at the revolutions which continually do and continually must flash before it ; perhaps also it might with more grace accept the inevitable, and cease from useless attempts at making a wholly new world conform itself to the rules and theories of a bygone civilization.
Among the transformations effected by steam-locomotion, perhaps the most obvious of all is the rapid enlargement of the area of civilization. Emigration has recently passed into a new phase of development, under which it might almost be said that entire nations have been mobilized. Until as recently as the year 1847, the old Phœnician method of colonization, somewhat improved in details, yet prevailed. As the Greeks sent out colonies to the Ægean isles, to Asia Minor, and to Sicily, — as the Romans conquered the barbarians, and then held them as colonists, — so the Spanish, the Dutch, the French, and the English planted their offshoots in every quarter of the globe called uncivilized. In some regions, as in the East, they held races in subjection, and fostered colonies of the Roman type, while in others they established feeble settlements on the model of the Greeks. As a rule, the growth of these colonies was as slow in the modern as it had been in the ancient times. By no means was it always even rapid enough to be healthy. A few, in the long course of years, struggled through the vicissitudes of infancy and became flourishing communities ; many languished, and many died. The law of their progression through twenty centuries had continued essentially the same.
At length, in 1846, vague rumors of regions rich beyond all precedent in golden ores, and only then discovered on the shores of the Pacific, pervaded the whole civilized globe, and, under the influence of steam, a new phase of colonization at once developed itself. To the new gold-fields rushed whole populations, and forthwith steam became their servant, and bound them closely with the older world. Where yesterday had been a wilderness, California and Australia took their places among the communities of the globe. The new era was making itself felt, and, under its fostering impulse, communities sprang into life full grown. Without the assistance of steam, settlements would probably have been established, and lingered in slow growth, along the shores of the sea and on the banks of navigable rivers ; but the steamboat and the locomotive lent their aid, and the very Arabs of civilization became substantial communities. So far as the inducement of gold was concerned, the same process now going on upon both slopes of the Rocky Mountains was witnessed in the colonization of Mexico and Cuba. With Cuba it succeeded, as the ocean connected the colonist with the world ; with Mexico it failed, because colonization was too rapid to be healthy, and the scattered emigrants, cut off from and unsupported by the intercourse of their kind, merged into, and both degraded and were degraded by, the semi-civilization of the aborigines. Such was not the case with Nevada. The discovery of some black-looking, heavy fragments of stone in the uninhabited, hideous region of the Great Basin suddenly revealed to the world in 1859 the existence of that famous Comstock lode, which almost at once called a State into existence. Mining-camps, towns, and even cities started up like mushrooms and at once experienced the influence of the new law of civilization. No long, wearisome, and dangerous wagon-road, scarcely marked out across the plains, connected a nomadic population of semi-barbarous, undomesticated men with a distant civilization which was to them as a dream of their childhood ; but, almost at once, the ringing grooves of the railroad merged them with the denser populations of the East and West. So the new era of material development, by a process of its own, is peopling and subduing the wilds of America and Australia. This is the present exemplification of a law which dates back only twenty years.
What other possible exemplifications of it await us ? California and Australia have revealed their secrets ; — how long will those of Mexico and South America and Africa remain concealed ? The application of the new process of development to Mexico and South America can only be a question of time ; already begun, it must go on. But as yet Africa can but be accounted among the possibilities of the future. Let it once share the fate, as it one day may well do, of California or of Australia, let it once reveal a hidden wealth, which somewhere surely exists, and those now living may see the solution of its enigma. Now, such a result is but a dream ; but it is a dream far less strange than the Australian and Californian facts of the last twenty years.
We are always inclined to look upon the world as finished, upon known forces as having produced their final results ; but results are never complete. Perhaps in 1481 the thinkers of that day may have considered that the printing-press had expended its force as a new power ; and in 1522 philosophers may have supposed that the ultimate material effects of geographical discovery could be approximately estimated. But, while it is given to ordinary men to see the full fruits of their own action, the seed sown by men of genius, though it may germinate early, arrives at its maturity only with a distant posterity. The discoveries of Guttenberg and Columbus have produced more startling and more clearly defined results upon the destinies of the human race within the last twenty-five years than in any other equal period of time during the four previous centuries. So will it be with the discovery made by Watt, and its applications by Fulton and Stephenson. A remote civilization in central Africa or South America may perhaps hereafter gauge its whole influence in subduing the wilderness and forcing its secrets from the innermost recesses of nature, but the casting up of that balance sheet will not fall to the lot of this century.
Yet the extent of the change wrought by the new force upon the limits of civilization has hardly been greater than that which has been effected in manners and habits of thought. Whatever constantly enters into the daily life soon becomes an unnoticed part of it, and the infinitely varied influences of the railroad system are so much a part of our everyday acts and thoughts that they have become familiar, and have ceased to be marvellous. The changes have been so gradual that we have failed to notice their completeness. Yet most people who observe at all have vaguely felt that there was some element which made the present century different from all others, — a century of surprises. The young have found things different upon attaining manhood from what they remembered in their youth ; the middle-aged have wondered if change flashed in the eyes of their fathers as it has in their own ; and the old can easily remember a period less removed from the Middle Ages than from the passing year. Our times are not as those of our fathers.
No power has been so great as to be able to defy the influence of the new force at work, and no locality so obscure as to escape it. From the most powerful of European monarchies to the most insignificant of New England villages, the revolution has been all-pervading. Abroad and at home it has equally nationalized people and cosmopolized nations. The chief bonds of nationality are unities of race, of language, of interest, and of thought. The tendency of steam has universally been towards the gravitation of the parts to the centre, — towards the combination and concentration of forces, whether intellectual or physical. Increased communication, increased activity, and increased facilities of trade destroy local interests, local dialects, and local jealousies. The days of small barrier kingdoms and intricate balances of power are wellnigh numbered. Whatever is homogeneous is combining all the world over in obedience to an irresistible law. It is the law of gravitation applied to human affairs. One national centre regulates the whole daily thought, trade, and language of great nations, and regulates it instantly. In this way, France and England are already bound as closely into two compact wholes, as were formerly the parishes of London or the arrondissements of Paris. The same law is revolutionizing Italy. In that country the long-scattered elements of homogeneity, — long kept by foreign influence apart, and in a condition of artificial hostility and jealousy, — yielding with hard struggle to the new influence, are at last drawn together, and are combining with each other as by chemical affinity. Cavour had destiny on his side, and Austria struggled against fate. But for steam the fate of Italy would yet be more than doubtful. Local jealousies, foreign influence, and domestic treason might well destroy all that has been effected. Sicily might be set up against Sardinia, and Tuscany against Rome. But every mile of completed railroad takes for Italian unity a new bond of fate, — banishes a little more of local jealousy, local interest, and local dialect, and, without the aid of a leader, completes the unfinished task of a statesman.
The same phenomena and the same results are witnessed in northern Europe. The nationalities gravitate. The old, artificial, evil barriers set up by dynasties upon certain inhuman theories as to the balance of powers are visibly breaking down. All Germany, to its own great amazement, finds itself irresistibly drawn towards Prussia, and Prussia will very shortly, not less to its own amazement, find itself Germanized. A power stronger than diplomacy or statecraft is steadily and silently at work ; but while, in one locality, it compels to union, in another it tears asunder. Germany unites, but Austria, made up of discordant elements which for centuries have been retained under one head by a skilfully contrived and artificially stimulated antagonism and jealousy of forces, rapidly finds her position becoming untenable. The Hun, the Croat, and the Transylvanian will not combine. They have no affinities of race, of language, or of interest, — the ingredients will not mix. To yield the popular reforms insures disintegration : to resist them provokes revolution. The revolutions of the steam-engine have at last rendered forever impracticable the traditional policy of the house of Hapsburg.
The same new elements are rapidly working out its problems for Russia. Not twenty years ago all Europe was perplexed and alarmed by the growth and imagined power of the empire of the Czars. The seeds of destruction seemed, however, to lie hidden in the very successes of power. It might well be deemed impossible that the vast, incongruous, overgrown empire could remain united from the Baltic to the Bosporus. All this is now changed. Within the last few years only, — brought to it in great degree by the disasters of the Crimea, — the ingredients have been cast into the crucible. Railroads are in course of construction all over the country, and, under their influence, the affinities day by day unite. In a few years Constantinople will be nearer to St. Petersburg than Moscow once was, and the whole great nation will be bound together hard and fast by the iron bands.
On this continent, our own country is the child of the locomotive. With us it has neither combined homogeneous elements, nor forced into conflict those that were incongruous, but it has rapidly disseminated one element over a vast wilderness. The steamboat and railroad alone have rendered existing America possible.
Such are some of the results of peace. The same force has left a deep mark on the results of modern warfare, — a mark no less noticeable from its absence than from its presence. The history of two recent wars, not ten years apart, perfectly illustrates the possible differences of result arising from the regard or disregard of this new element of power. These two are the war in the Crimea and our own Rebellion. Russia failed of success in the Crimea, because she could not avail herself of the steam-engine ; the Allies succeeded, because they could avail themselves of the steam-ship. Marseilles and Plymouth were infinitely nearer to Sebastopol than were Moscow and St. Petersburg. The new element of force and combination, neglected by Russia in 1854, we availed ourselves of with decisive effect in 1864. That one new element of power — wholly left out of their calculations by European military authorities in exercising the gifts of prophecy on the result of our struggle — was the one element which made possible the results we accomplished. They told us of the vastness of the territory to be subdued, of the impossibility of sustaining our armies, of the power of a people acting on the defensive. They pointed to Napoleon’s dismal experience in Russia, and wondered and sneered at those who would not learn from the experience of others, or profit from the disasters of the past. They could not realize, and would take no count of, the improved appliances of the age. The result the world knows. It saw a powerful enemy’s very existence depending upon a frail thread of railroad iron, with the effectual destruction of which perished all hope of resistance ; it saw Sherman’s three hundred miles of rear, and the base and supplies of eighty thousand fighting men in security three days’ journey by rail away from the sound of strife ; it saw two whole army corps, numbering eighteen thousand men, moved, with all their munitions and a portion of their artillery, thirteen hundred miles round the circumference of a vast theatre of war, from Virginia to Tennessee, in the moment of danger, and this too in the apparently incredibly brief space of only seven days. From Alexander to Napoleon, the possibilities of combination in warfare were in essentials the same. Within thirty years of the death of Napoleon, that was accomplished which to him would have read as the tale of some Arabian Night. The changes of thirty years threw deep into the shade those of thirty centuries.
All those yet referred to are but the interior circles of the influences already perceptible from the disturbing action of this one new force. It does not confine itself to nationalizing each severed race, but it cosmopolizes nations. It is in this respect, perhaps, that the world is brought face to face with the most subtle and disturbing influence of its new era, — an influence of which the early quickenings are but now making themselves felt, and the complete development of which must be the work of another century. As a result of the frequent and easy intercourse among the nations which has existed of late, — the rapid exchange both of thought and of presence, — there has arisen a steady and increasing tendency towards a union of sympathetic forces, overcoming the barriers of language, habit, and race. New questions are looming up, involving the social relations and the division of the fruits of industry, which are common to all countries, and which bid fair in great degree to supersede questions of local interest. The two great permanent parties into which mankind must always be divided are thus brought vividly into the foreground carrying on their struggle over these problems in a way hitherto unknown. The innovators strive to combine the world over. They regard the peculiar class of questions with which they concern themselves as overriding all considerations of religion or nationality, the ancient sheet-anchors of society. They hold international congresses and organize international associations, thus seeking gradually to create a government within existing governments. The end they keep ever in view is such a close concentration of forces as shall enable them to act with decisive effect upon any point of immediate conflict. Meanwhile the party of conservatism, divided by traditional lines, seeks continually to effect the impossible by struggling to preserve forms from which the life has gone out. Hence results a period of transition, marked by a state of human affairs almost wholly wanting in the one element which mankind most eagerly covets, that of stability. The party of attack does not as yet know what it really desires, and the party of resistance mainly sustains itself by virtue of the blunders of its opponents. It would be wholly futile to philosophize over the possible results of this wide array of forces. So far as the facilities of intercourse affect them, the issue would seem to be, whether, in the process of time, a unity of end among men may be brought to override the prejudice of race. The most advanced portions of the world are unquestionably still far from any such result ; this description of mobilization is hardly yet begun. At the same time passing events in Europe would seem to indicate that the seed may now be sown broadcast, which is destined to grow until it shall shatter the whole fabric of modern society.
Hitherto this tendency to assimilation has expended itself in the reduction of differences. Much in the way of destruction yet remains to be done before the plan of construction can reveal itself. Meanwhile an incessant wearing away of individual characteristics is very perceptible. More notably is this the case as regards the outward aspect of civilized countries. Since 1830 all the world travels. Already the whole Caucasian race looks alike and talks alike, and is rapidly growing to live alike and to think alike. We mix and mingle, until there is no strangeness left. Those of middle life yet remember Paris and London in the days of the diligence and the stage-coach ; and Rome has come directly within the influence of railroads only within the last ten years ; but, after all, the mushroom cities of America, in their very brick and mortar, — in the architecture of their buildings and the age of their walls, — are the same in appearance, and just as ancient, as modern London or Paris. We dream of England as old ; we dwell upon the descriptions of English humorists, and picture to ourselves the quaint rambling inns and familiar streets of Dickens, — the haunts of Dr. Johnson and of Boswell, — the spots made familiar by Irving and his great progenitor who showed old Sir Roger the sights of the town ; we insensibly associate with modern London, in childlike fancy, the familiar scenes of English literature, from Prince Hal and Jack Falstaff at the Boar’s Head Inn to Mr. Pickwick snuffing the morning air in Goswell Street. We still go to that city vaguely expecting to find the quaintness we imagine; at any rate, we do not look for what we left behind us in America. Probably some of this quaintness did until recently linger about London. But though 1829 did not work all its changes at once, the old and quaint went out with stage-coaches. Today we might as well look for traces of the Indians on Boston Common, or of the renowned Wouter Van Twiller on Manhattan Island. Paris and London have yielded to the new influence, and are giving up their distinctive characteristics, to become the stereotyped railroad centres of the future. Rome, under the influence of the Papacy, resisted the revolution a little longer ; and there, until recently, the traveller could yet dwell a moment with the past, and enjoy an instant’s forgetfulness of the wearying march of progress. But even there the shrill scream of the steam-whistle broke the silence of the Campagna, and a steam-engine had possession of the palace of the Cenci.
At home, too, we notice similar change. The Revolution has swept away the last vestiges of colonial thoughts and persons. Who that has ever formerly lived in a New England country town does not remember its old quiet and dulness, its industry, the slow, steady growth of its prosperity, and the staidness of its inhabitants ? There, also, you met a class of men now wholly gone, — dull, solid, elderly men, men of some property and few ideas, — the legitimate descendants of the English broad-acred squires. They were the gentry, — the men who went up to the General Court, and had been members of the Governor’s Council ; they were men of formal bearing and of formal dress, — men who remembered Governor Hancock, and had a certain trace of his manners. To-day this class is extinct. Railroads have abolished them and their dress and their habits, — they have abolished the very houses they dwelt in. The race of hereditary gentry has gone forever, and the race of hereditary business-men has usurped its place. They represent the railroad, as the earlier type did the stage-coach.
The same phenomena are-witnessed in the regions of thought. It is bolder than of yore. It exerts its influence with a speed and force equally accelerated. The newspaper press is the great engine of modern education ; and that press, obeying the laws of gravitation, is everywhere centralized, — the rays of light once scattered are concentrated into one all-powerful focus. To-day’s metropolitan newspaper, printed by a steampress, is whirled three hundred miles away by a steam-engine before the day’s last evening edition is in the hands of the carrier. The local press is day by day fighting a losing cause with diminished strength, while the metropolitan press drives it out of circulation and filches from it its brain. Ideas are quickly exchanged, and act upon each other. Nations can no longer, except wilfully, persist in national blunders. Literatures can no longer lie hid as did the German until so few years ago. Since 1830 the nations are woven together by the network of iron, and all thought and results of thought are in common. The same problems perplex at once the whole world, and from every quarter light floods in upon their solution. But increased communication has not alone quickened and intensified thought, — it has revolutionized its process. One great feature of the future must be the rapid uprising of new communities. Of all such communities questioning is a leading characteristic. They have neither faith in, nor reverence for, that which is old. On the contrary, with them age is a strong prima facie evidence of badness, and they love novelty for novelty’s sake. This mental inclination will ultimately apply the last test to truth, for error has its full chance and is sure of a trial. The burden of proof seems likely to be shifted from the innovator to the conservator.
It is in the domains of trade, however, that the revolution is the most apparent and bewildering, — that the sequences of cause and effect are most innumerable and interminable. Herbert Spencer says that it would require a volume to trace through all its ramifications the contingent effects of the everyday act of lighting a fire. These effects are imperceptible, but the influence of steam locomotion as applied to trade is as apparent as it is infinite. In this respect steam has proved itself to be not only the most obedient of slaves, but likewise the most tyrannical of masters. It pulls down as well as builds up. The very forces of nature do not stand in its way. It overcomes the wind and tide, and abolishes the Mississippi River. It is as whimsical as it is powerful. The individual it carries whithersoever he will, but whole communities it carries whither they would not. It makes the grass grow in the once busy streets of small commercial centres, like Nantucket, Salem, and Charleston. It robs New Orleans of that monopoly of wealth which the Mississippi River once promised to pour into her lap. It threatens to make a solitude of the once busy wharves of Boston, and it fills New Hampshire with deserted farms. For some mysterious reasons which it will never disclose, it carries wealth and importance past one threshold that it may lay them down at another. The old channels of commerce are broken up, and the points which depended upon them are left to philosophize upon the mutability of human affairs in forgotten obscurity. Meanwhile San Francisco and Chicago spring up like a very palace of Aladdin, and the centre of population is transferred, as if by magic, to some point which existed in the school-books of the present generation of men only as a howling wilderness. Meanwhile prices seek a level ; produce is exchanged ; labor goes where it is needed. England and Russia exchange bread for cotton, and Iowa and Ireland, labor for corn. These countries are nearer to one another now than in 1829 were the very counties of England. Increased activity demands new centres and channels, and those phenomena result which men call railroad centres, the apparition of which on the face of the earth is confounding and puzzling all thinking men. At the time of the great plague, just before the fire of 1666, De Foe estimated the population of London at one million souls ; but Macaulay places it, more accurately, for about the same time, at 500,000. In the succeeding century and a half it increased about threefold, until, in 1831, it numbered 1,600,000. The new era then commenced, and from that time the growth of London was almost to be dated. During the next twenty years its population had risen to 2,500,000 ; and to-day it contains within its limits hardly less than 4,000,000 of human beings. Between 1666 and 1821 it had a growth of three hundred per cent, and it has experienced nearly similar increase between 1821 and 1871. When Fulton steamed up the Hudson, Paris was a city of rather more than half a million of inhabitants, and it now numbers about 2,000,000. In the days of Louis XIV. it had 490,000, and in 1841, 912,000, — an increase of one hundred per cent in two centuries. In 1866 it had 1,825,000, — an increase of one hundred per cent in twenty-five years.
The results in America have been no less extraordinary. In 1807 New York numbered a population of about 75,000. Chicago existed in 1829 only as an uninviting swamp inhabited by a dozen families, and San Francisco was hardly a name. In 1830 New York contained over 200,000 inhabitants ; and to-day they exceed 900,000, without considering those suburbs which enter so largely into the bulk of London and Paris. Between 1829 and 1870 Chicago had increased to 300,000, and San Francisco since 1847 has become a city of 150,000 inhabitants.
Nearly twenty years ago Macaulay called attention to the fearful human material of which this growth was composed. He then referred to the arguments used by Gibbon and Adam Smith to prove that the world would not again be flooded with barbarism ; and he remarked that it had not occurred to those philosophers “that civilization itself might engender the barbarians who should destroy it. It had not occurred to them that in the very heart of great capitals, in the neighborhood of splendid palaces and churches and theatres and libraries and museums, vice and ignorance might produce a race of Huns fiercer than those who marched under Attila, and of Vandals more bent on destruction than those who followed Genseric.” When Macaulay used these words in Edinburgh in 1852, he could hardly have realized that the growth of those great cities was but just begun ; but since that time London has increased fifty per cent, and the “ Vandals ” of Paris have recently given a point to his well-balanced period which it never had before. For America, and the permanence of republican institutions, this tendency of population to concentrate at great railroad centres, cannot fail to be a subject for anxious consideration. The success of popular government must depend solely upon the virtue, the intelligence, and the public spirit of the people governed. As long as the members of any community can be approached by reason, or by argument, or by considerations of the public good, there is no sound cause to despair of the safety of any republic. It is useless, however, to hope or to struggle for that safety for any length of time after one party has firmly established its power upon the basis of an ignorant, unapproachable proletariat. The tendency of all self-governed great cities is inevitably towards this political control through the agency of irresponsible masses. The history of Athens and of Rome is continually repeating itself, and never has its reproduction displayed features more closely resembling the great originals than now in the leading municipalities of America. In what respect, except in name, does the city of New York enjoy a republican form of government ? Yet the difference between New York and the other great cities of the continent is simply one of degree. The same tendencies, which must inevitably lead to the same results, are manifest everywhere. The dense aggregation of mankind may be said to necessarily result in an upper class which wants to be governed, and in a lower class which has to be governed. The extreme of luxury and the extreme of misery are equally fatal to public virtues ; and no one can doubt that the great cities of the future are destined infinitely to surpass, both as regards luxury and misery, anything of the kind which the world has yet seen. This must result from the mere progress of railroad development. It is no less certain that republican America is destined very shortly to be dotted all over with these centres of population. Created by railroads, the railroads lend to them a gravitating influence both moral and political which cannot be ignored. To hope for a pure government by the people at large while ignorance and corruption are the ruling forces in these centres, is as futile as it would be to look for healthy members where the vitals are diseased. This it is which really constitutes that problem of great cities which so confounds the friends of popular government.
Meanwhile the influence of this railroad power upon the politics of America and the political theories at the base of party organizations has been very strongly defined and little considered. Paradoxical as it sounds, it has actually made that which was mistaken, right, and that which was dangerous, safe. The year 1830 was a year of political revolution in America, — the friends of a strong central government went out of power, and a party hostile in theory to all concentration of governmental functions came in. It can now hardly admit of a doubt that both parties to that bitter and memorable struggle were right, and it is equally true that both were wrong. Both, however, were made right or wrong by one element which entered into the practical solution of the questions agitated with decisive consequences, — an element wholly unanticipated by either side, — the element of improved locomotion. It may now with safety be premised that a strong central government was a political necessity for the United States of a time anterior to 1830 ; that in this respect Hamilton was right and Jefferson was wrong. It may also, with equal safety, be asserted that a strong central government constitutes a continually increasing political danger for the United States of the period subsequent to 1830 ; that the school of Hamilton is wrong, and the school of Jefferson is right. An equally thoughtful and observant man would thus have been a Hamiltonian up to 1830, and a Jeffersonian subsequently to that date. During the first period he would have seen a country of vast dimensions and sparsely settled, without means of communication or diversified industries, full of local jealousies and destitute of any recognized centre of thought or business, — a country, in short, in constant danger of going to pieces from lack of cohesion, — a country in which the centrifugal force continually tended to overpower the centripetal. Then the railroad system sprang into being, and all this rapidly changed, — science suddenly supplied that cohesion which it had been the great study of the statesman to provide. The point from which danger was to be anticipated thus gradually passed to the other side of the circle, — everything centralized of itself, — all things gravitated : the unaided centripetal force was clearly overcoming the centrifugal. Thus the error of yesterday had become the truth of to-day, and the only men who were hopelessly wrong were the thoroughly consistent. The world at large rarely allows for these changes of conditions ; a statesman or a political party must stand or fall with the permanence of that policy with which they have identified themselves, and posterity rarely stops to consider how circumstances have altered cases. Yet it is none the less true that the inventions of Robert Fulton and George Stephenson settled, in the minds of all thinking men, those great questions of internal policy for the United States government which were so fiercely contested in the first cabinet of Washington ; and the way in which they settled them was by altering every condition of the problem. The destinies of nations are, perhaps, very much more frequently decided in the workshops of mechanics than in the councils of princes.
The influence of this same power has, however, made itself felt by the people of the United States in their political capacity more recently and in another way, though the sequel of this last experience is yet to be developed. The war of the rebellion left the United States heavily burdened with debt, upon which a high rate of interest had to be paid, while its people were at once infected with a mania for speculation and debauched by an irredeemable paper currency. A system of taxation was in use calculated to excite in equal degrees the wonder and contempt of all future students of fiscal problems. Under these circumstances the shrewdest men of business were always predicting an immediate and wide-spread commercial catastrophe, and the more cunning politicians hastened to conciliate the spirit of repudiation, which they asserted was sure to rise up. History furnished no precedent which would lead any political economist to suppose that a currency once greatly debased would ever appreciate through a regular and healthy process ; and the statesman could not but see with alarm evidences of indebtedness passing out of the country into foreign hands by the hundreds of millions. It is not too much to say that the financial history of the six years between 1865 and 1871 falsified every prediction ever made as regards it. No wide-spread commercial crisis, no general collapse of private credit took place in America, nor did that one which swept over England cross the Atlantic ; the public debt was steadily decreased, and the interest upon it was cheerfully paid ; the spirit of repudiation ruined in its early death the hopes of numerous political charlatans ; the currency rapidly appreciated to its gold value, while the mass of indebtedness against the country held in foreign hands constantly increased, and showed no signs of a return for redemption.
The simple truth was that, through its energetic railroad development, the country then was producing real wealth as no country ever produced it before. Behind all the artificial inflation, which, if the experience of the past was worth anything, so clearly foreshadowed a catastrophe, there was also going on a production which exceeded all experience. This new element vitiated the best reasoned conclusions. The railroad system, acting upon undeveloped and inexhaustible natural resources, dragged the country through its difficulties in spite of itself, — it actually seemed as though fraud, ignorance, and speculation combined were unable to precipitate disaster. While all of these agents were noisily at work, every mile of railroad constructed was quietly adding many times its cost to the aggregate wealth of the country, — the tonnage carried over the new roads built each year was many hundreds of millions in value, while that of the old roads always increased, so that the estimated average of annual transportation, which was but $85 for each inhabitant of the country in 1860, had, in 1870, risen to $300.
Such an increase in actual production could alone account for the general setting aside of all the lessons of the past. Not the least instructive part of this experience was, perhaps, the complacency with which a certain class of philosophers mistook the operation of a great, quiet, natural force for the results of their own meddling. One school attributed the freedom from commercial disaster to the juggle of paper money. Another saw in the great prosperity of the day nothing but a vindication of the absurdities of protection. While sciolists talked, however, the locomotive was at work, and all the obstructions which they placed in its way could at most only check but never overcome the impetus it had given to material progress.
The same direct influences could unquestionably be traced into morals, which have been observed in other departments of life. The laws of combination and gravitation apply to ethics no less than trade. Here, however, it is far more difficult than elsewhere to strike the balance of profit and loss. Whether the world, as a whole, is better or worse than it was forty years ago is a point upon which the statistician can as yet throw little light, and concerning which the divergence of opinion between the old and the young is apt to be excessive. One thing is very clear, the golden age of purity and simplicity has always lain behind us ever since those early times when it was first created in the imagination of the earliest poets. We never realize how bad the old times were, until we come to grope amid the happily forgotten records of their filthy vices.
Such is a passing sketch of some of the disturbing influences of the new power on the general aspect of the century, — influences so all-pervading in their results as to be rather revolutionizing than disturbing. Whatever affects the whole affects every part. It would therefore be mere waste of time to follow out with curious assiduity the myriad remoter ramifications, until, among larger incidents of change, we should find the possibilities of emigration modifying for a time the terrible truth of the Malthusian theory of population, and the exodus of the nations going quietly on before our eyes upon a scale which reduces to insignificance the largest of those human tides the flow of which is traced through the pages of Gibbon ; or we might see the Highlander expelled from the mountain fastnesses of his clan, because the railroad has made them so accessible as a pleasure-ground to the English nobleman, and a writer like John Stuart Mill forced to declare that so wonderful are the changes, both moral and economical, taking place in our age, that, without perpetually rewriting a work like his “Elements of Political Economy,” it is impossible to keep up with them. Such would be the instances among nations and authors, and, descending, we should see the increased demand for a cheap press influencing the price of rags in a country village, and the increased use of lubricating oil compensating to the fisheries for the innovation of gas. All of these, too, are the revolutions worked in a single half-century by a force which is as yet bound up in its swaddling-clothes. Its iron arms have been stretched out in every direction ; nothing has escaped their reach, and the most firmly established institutions of man have proved under their touch as plastic as clay. Everything is changing, and will change with increasing rapidity. No human power can stop it. It is useless to cast back regretful glances at the old quiet days of other years and another order of things, — at the middle ages antecedent to 1807. The progressive may exult, and the conservative may repine, but the result will be all the same. We must follow out the era on which we have entered to its logical and ultimate conclusions, for it is useless for men to stand in the way of steam-engines. Change is usually ugly, and the whole world, both physical and moral, is now in a period of transition. But the serpent does not cast his skin till the new one is formed beneath the old ; and because the old world is now sloughing its skin, we cannot conclude that the world of the future is to exist without one.
“ To-day I saw the dragon-fly
Come from the wells where he did lie.
“ An inner impulse rent the veil
Of his old husk ; from head to tail
Came out clear plates of sapphire-mail.
“ He dried his wings ; like gauze they grew ;
Through crofts and pastures wet with dew,
A living flash of light he flew.”
It would be simply presumptuous to try to cast the horoscope of this revolution after thus surveying the changes already wrought. If we wished to draw a few feeble inferences to reassure ourselves in regard to the future, we could best do so by falling back on the analogies of the past. The changes of the future will undoubtedly be more rapid, more complete and more bewildering than those of the past, in the same ratio that the combined forces now at work are engines more powerful for change than the comparatively simple ones of the earlier days. Still, the past cannot but throw some light on the future. To the dwellers in it, the world doubtless seemed sufficiently lovely before the middle of the fifteenth century ; but then the sloughing-time came on, and the old skin was slowly shed, and, in the ripeness of time, the new was found better. The old passed away amid the fierce contortions of tortured communities, — through wars and revolutions and inquisitions and anarchy. The period of change was ugly, and mankind often had cause for discouragement ; but the worst times were found bearable, and the result has justified the price. Our era has just begun to work its own revolution. That its results will all be pleasant, we may not hope ; that its course will be marked by fierce agonies, we have been fully taught by the events of the last few years ; but that it will in the end serve to elevate and make more happy the whole race of man upon earth, we have some cause to trust. Yet in surveying the history of the last great era just finished, — the distinctive era of the printing-press, with all its changes from 1444 to 1807, — the imagination is bewildered and lost in the vain effort to realize those more striking changes which are to make remarkable the new era upon which we have just entered, — the distinctive era of steam locomotion.
* By CHARLES F. ADAMS, Jr. Much of the material used in the preparation of this paper originally appeared in the following articles in the North American Review : The Railroad System, April, 1868 ; Railroad Inflation, January, 1869 ; Railroad Problems in 1869, January, 1870 ; The Government and the Railroad Corporations, January, 1871.