w England.

THE RAILROAD QUESTION.

CHAPTER I.

HISTORY of TRANSPORTATION.

While the prosperity of a country depends largely upon its
productiveness, the importance of proper facilities for the expeditious
transportation and ready exchange of its various products can scarcely
be overrated. The free circulation of commercial commodities is as
essential to the welfare of a people as is the unimpaired circulation of
the blood to the human organism.

The interest taken by man in the improvement of the roads over which he
must travel is one of the chief indications of civilization, and it
might even be said that the condition of the roads of a country shows
the degree of enlightenment which its people have reached. The trackless
though very fertile regions of Central Africa have for thousands of
years remained the seat of savages; but no nation that established a
system of public thoroughfares through its dominion ever failed to make
a distinguished figure in the theater of the world. There are some
authors who go even so far as to call the high roads of commerce the
pioneers of enlightenment and political eminence. It is true that as
roads and canals developed the commerce of Eastern Asia and Europe, the
attention of their people was turned to those objects which distinguish
cultured nations and lead to political consequence among the powers of
the world. The systems of roads and canals which we find among those
ancients who achieved an advanced state of civilization might well put
to shame the roads which disgraced not a few of the European states as
late as the eighteenth century.

Among the early nations of Asia of whose internal affairs we have any
historic knowledge are the Hindoos, the Assyrians and Babylonians, the
Phoenicians, the Persians and the Chinese.

The wealth of India was proverbial long before the Christian era. She
supplied Nineveh and Babylon, and later Greece and Rome, with steel,
zinc, pearls, precious stones, cotton, silk, sugar-cane, ivory, indigo,
pepper, cinnamon, incense and other commodities. If we accept the
testimony of the Vedas, the religious books of the ancient Hindoos, a
high degree of culture must have prevailed on the shores of the Ganges
more than three thousand years ago. Highways were constructed by the
state and connected the interior of the realm with the sea and the
countries to the northeast and northwest. For this purpose forests were
cleared, hills levele