system itself grew out of higher instincts.
Equal communities demand equal privileges and advantages. They tend
to produce a common level. The country does not acquiesce in the
superiority of the city in manners, comforts, or luxuries. It demands
a market at its door,--first-rate men for its advisers in all medical,
legal, moral, and political matters. It demands for itself the
amusements, the refinements, the privileges of the city. This is to
be brought about only by the application, at any cost, of the most
immediate methods of communication with the city; and behold our
railroad system,--the Briarean shaking of hands which the country gives
the city! The growth of this system is a curious commentary on the
purely mercenary policy which is ordinarily supposed to govern the
investments of capital. The railroads of the United States are as much
the products of social rivalries and the fruits of an ineradicable
democratic instinct for popularizing all advantages, as of any
commercial emulation. The people have willingly bandaged their own eyes,
and allowed themselves to believe a profitable investment was made,
because their inclinations were so determined to have the roads,
profitable or not. Their wives and daughters _would_ shop in the city;
the choicest sights and sounds were there; there concentrated themselves
the intellectual and moral lights; there were the representative
splendors of the state or nation;--and a swift access to them was
essential to true equality and self-respect.

One does not need to be a graybeard to recall the time when every
county-town in New England had, because it needs must have, its
first rate lawyer, its distinguished surgeon, its comprehensive
business-man,--and when a fixed and unchanging population gave to our
villages a more solid and a more elegant air than they now possess. The
Connecticut river-villages, with a considerable increase in population,
and a vast improvement in the general character of the dwellings, have
nevertheless lost their most characterizing features,--the large and
dignified residences of their founders, and the presence of the once
able and widely known men that were identified with their local
importance and pride. The railroads have concentrated the ability of all
the professions in the cities, and carried thither the wealth of all the
old families. To them, and not to the county-town, repair the people for
advice in all critical matters, for supplies in