trains are becoming cosmopolitan. They invade fields which a few years
ago were impenetrable. The world's products are exchanged as never
before and with increasing transportation facilities come increasing
knowledge and larger trade. Prices are fixed with mathematical precision
by supply and demand. The world's selling prices are regulated by market
and crop reports. We travel greater distances in a shorter space of time
and with more ease than was ever dreamed of by the fathers. Isolation is
no longer possible or desirable. The same important news is read, tho in
different languages, the same day in all Christendom.

The telegraph keeps us advised of what is occurring everywhere, and the
Press foreshadows, with more or less accuracy, the plans and purposes of
the nations. Market prices of products and of securities are hourly
known in every commercial mart, and the investments of the people extend
beyond their own national boundaries into the remotest parts of the
earth. Vast transactions are conducted and international exchanges are
made by the tick of the cable. Every event of interest is immediately
bulletined. The quick gathering and transmission of news, like rapid
transit, are of recent origin, and are only made possible by the genius
of the inventor and the courage of the investor. It took a special
messenger of the government, with every facility known at the time for
rapid travel, nineteen days to go from the City of Washington to New
Orleans with a message to General Jackson that the war with England had
ceased and a treaty of peace had been signed. How different now! We
reached General Miles, in Porto Rico, and he was able through the
military telegraph to stop his army on the firing line with the message
that the United States and Spain had signed a protocol suspending
hostilities. We knew almost instanter of the first shots fired at
Santiago, and the subsequent surrender of the Spanish forces was known
at Washington within less than an hour of its consummation. The first
ship of Cervera's fleet had hardly emerged from that historic harbor
when the fact was flashed to our Capitol, and the swift destruction that
followed was announced immediately through the wonderful medium of
telegraphy.

So accustomed are we to safe and easy communication with distant lands
that its temporary interruption, even in ordinary times, results in loss
and inconvenience. We shall never forget the days of anxious waiting and
su