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usefulness. The food, medicines, and attention which animal life
demands, form very serious items of expense in the case of beasts of
burden, and so very materially impair their utility. It is otherwise
with the locomotive engine. Money, ingenuity, and toil require
undoubtedly to be expended in its original construction, attention
and care must be given to avert or repair accident, and food of its
own peculiar kind it does unquestionably consume; yet when all the
original and working expenses of a locomotive are summed up, it is
found that, compared with the income it produces, it is the cheapest
of all motive agents.

No doubt the items of railway expenditure now mentioned do not
nearly exhaust the amount of money required in their construction.
In addition to expensive engines, there require carriages to be
supplied for the transport of goods and passengers, houses and sheds
to be built for their temporary accommodation, salaries to be paid
for management and service; and in addition to all this, there must
further be expended in the construction of the line itself sums far
greater in amount than those spent in the formation and repair of
roads and highways. All this is true; but in estimating the
comparative costliness of the old and new methods of
land-locomotion, regard must be had to the amount of their produce
as well as of their outlay; and an opinion regarding their
respective merits, in an economical point of view, must be formed by
striking a balance between these two sides of the account. The
result of such a comparison proves that in point of economy, not
less than of speed and endurance, railways take precedence over all
other known means of locomotion. This combined result of rapidity
and cheapness of transit produces a double effect upon a mercantile
community: it at once enables merchants to realise the fruits of a
given speculation more quickly, which is nothing else than
transacting more business in a shorter period than before; and it
also enables them to do this increased amount of business with a
smaller amount of actual outlay--that is, to extend with safety and
profit the field of their operations beyond those boundaries which
prudence formerly marked out as the proper limits of speculation.

When we consider the amount of travelling within the island which is
requisite for carrying on the mercantile and general business of the
country, and the double saving, therefore, of time on the one ha