hey are enormously overdoing the thing, but whenever they
build a railroad, even unwisely, the railroad will remain as something
to show for the money when the spree is over."

"That is true enough," said Duncan, "and of course all this railroad and
other building is, incidentally, giving work and wages to great
multitudes of men. But are we not paying too high a price for the good
we get? We are building debts about forty per cent. faster than we are
building railroads. Every mile of track is constructed with borrowed
money, worth only about sixty cents on the dollar. Yet every dollar of
these borrowings must some day be paid off in gold. And in the meantime
the roads must pay a high interest rate on a dollar for every sixty
cents' worth of money borrowed. I do not see how the country can stand
it."

"It can't, permanently, and you haven't mentioned the worst feature of
the matter."

"What is that?"

"Why, in the craze for building railroads, men are projecting and
building many lines that are not needed at all. In some cases two, or
even three, parallel roads are being built through regions that can
never support more than one. It is sheer waste, and of course it means
collapse sooner or later. But there is another side to the matter. The
country is growing enormously in wealth, and still more enormously in
productive capacity. Nothing helps such growth like the multiplication
and extension of railroads. They bring men near to their markets. They
make farming profitable where before it would have been a waste of
labor. They multiply farms and towns, swell the population, and in that
way make a market for manufactures. If we could cut out the parallel
lines and other foolishly projected roads, I firmly believe the growth
of the country in consequence of railroad building would more than
compensate for the extra cost entailed upon us by borrowing at a time of
depreciation in the currency. But we can't prevent fool projectors from
building foolishly, and some day the country's sound business must
shoulder all that load of bad investments. When a boy eats green apples
he is in for a colic, but he generally gets over the colic. It will be
so with the country."

Then the talk turned into a more practical channel.

"You feel sure, then," asked Duncan, "that we are making no mistake and
doing no harm in carrying out our project of a railroad that shall
bring Cairo closer to New York in the matter of railroad mileage?"