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That has not yet come. But there are other enterprises men must push mines to be dug, railroads to be surveyed and built, slaves to be emancipated, farms to be cultivated, mischiefs framed by a law to be averted, charities to be exercised, schools to be founded, and generally a living to be gotten. To what extent may we expect divine aid? First, all these things are his purposes and plans.
The railroads throughout the country are in a fair state of prosperity. Their service is good and their supply of cars is abundant. Their condition would be improved and the public better served by a system of consolidations.
To present an example, there could be no demand for railroad iron after our magnificent system of railroads, extending its benefits to every portion of the Union, had been brought to a dead pause. The same consequences have resulted from similar causes to many other branches of useful manufactures.
As a single illustration of what this meant before railroads, Samson and I, having to stop a day at Chicago, hired a buggy and drove into the neighbouring woods, or wilderness, to hunt for wild turkeys. Our outfit, the whole of which we got at St. Louis, consisted of two heavy wagons, nine mules, and eight horses.
Somewhere far, far away, beyond the line of the railroads, beyond some black roofs and the thin black trunks of trees, down low over the dark earth in which the eye does not see but rather senses the mighty green tone of spring, reddens with a scarlet gold the narrow, long streak of the sunset glow, which has pierced the dove-coloured mist.
Now we have three railroads meeting at our depot, a population of nearly seven thousand, electric lights, telephones, a good opera-house, a system of works which brings first-rate spring water into the town from six miles away, in short, pretty much all the modern conveniences." "But what has made the place grow so fast?" asked Clover.
After him came Frankling, of the Alfalfa Delts, whose father picked up bargains in railroads instead of gloves; then came Prexy, and after him the President of the United States and a few scattered celebrities, tailing down to the Mayor of Jonesville and its leading citizens mere nobodies. That's how important the outside world seemed to us.
But that was before the coming of the east-and-west canal and the east- and-west railroads, which virtually upheaved a new watershed and changed the whole physiographic, social, and economic relationships of the west. This is not observable on the topographical maps simply because of our unimaginative definition of a watershed.
Railroads, insurance companies, great banking concerns, vast industrial corporations, were associated in the public mind as "the Interests." And the United States Senate was deemed the stronghold of the interests. A saturnalia of senatorial muckraking now laid bare the "oligarchy," as the small group of powerful veteran Senators who controlled the senatorial machinery was called.
Since the extension of railroads northerly and westerly from the seaboard, it has however shared the fate of many New England villages in being left on one side of the main currents of commercial activity, and gradually assuming a character of repose and leisure, in many regards more attractive than the life and bustle of earlier days.
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