onstruct them, but that they would become a source Of revenue to
sadly depleted state treasuries. Much has been heard of government
ownership in recent years; yet it is nothing particularly new, for
many of the early railroads in these new Western States were built as
government enterprises, with results which were frequently disastrous.
This mania, with the land speculation accompanying it, was largely
responsible for the panic of 1837 and led to that repudiation of debts
in certain States which for so many years gave American investments an
evil reputation abroad.

In the more settled parts of the country, however, railroad building
had comparatively a more solid foundation. Yet the railroad map of
the forties indicates that railroad building in this early period was
incoherent and haphazard. Practically everywhere the railroad was an
individual enterprise; the builders had no further conception of it than
as a line connecting two given points usually a short distance apart.
The roads of those days began anywhere and ended almost anywhere. A few
miles of iron rail connected Albany and Schenectady. There was a road
from Hartford to New Haven, but there was none from New Haven to New
York. A line connected Philadelphia with Columbia; Baltimore had a road
to Washington; Charleston, South Carolina, had a similar contact with
Hamburg in the same State. By 1842, New York State, from Albany to
Buffalo, possessed several disconnected stretches of railroad. It was
not until 1836, when work was begun on the Erie Railroad, that a plan
was adopted for a single line reaching several hundred miles from an
obvious point, such as New York, to an obvious destination, such as
Lake Erie. Even then a few farsighted men could foresee the day when
the railroad train would cross the plains and the Rockies and link the
Atlantic and the Pacific. Yet, in 1850 nearly all the railroads in the
United States lay east of the Mississippi River, and all of them,
even when they were physically mere extensions of one another, were
separately owned and separately managed.

Successful as many of the railroads were, they had hardly yet
established themselves as the one preeminent means of transportation.
The canal had lost in the struggle for supremacy, but certain of these
constructed waterways, particularly the Erie, were flourishing with
little diminished vigor. The river steamboat had enjoyed a development
in the first few decades of the nineteenth c