mile.

This is one way, but happily things were managed differently. Railways
were constructed piece by piece, the pieces were joined together, and
the hundred different companies, to whom these pieces belonged,
gradually came to an understanding concerning the arrival and departure
of their trains, and the running of carriages on their rails, from all
countries, without unloading merchandise as it passes from one network
to another.

All this was done by free agreement, by exchange of letters and
proposals, and by congresses at which delegates met to discuss well
specified special points, and to come to an agreement about them, but
not to make laws. After the congress was over, the delegates returned to
their respective companies, not with a law, but with the draft of a
contract to be accepted or rejected.

Of course difficulties were met in the way. There were obstinate men
who would not be convinced. But a common interest compelled them to
agree in the end, without invoking the help of armies against the
refractory members.

This immense network of railways connected together, and the enormous
traffic it has given rise to, no doubt constitutes the most striking
trait of the nineteenth century; and it is the result of free agreement.
If somebody had foretold it eighty years ago, our grandfathers would
have thought him idiotic or mad. They would have said: "Never will you
be able to make the shareholders of a hundred companies listen to
reason! It is a Utopia, a fairy tale. A central Government, with an
'iron' dictator, can alone enforce it."

And the most interesting thing in this organization is, that there is no
European Central Government of Railways! Nothing! No minister of
railways, no dictator, not even a continental parliament, not even a
directing committee! Everything is done by free agreement.

So we ask the believers in the State, who pretend that "we can never do
without a central Government, were it only for regulating the traffic,"
we ask them: "But how do European railways manage without them? How do
they continue to convey millions of travellers and mountains of luggage
across a continent? If companies owning railways have been able to
agree, why should railway workers, who would take possession of
railways, not agree likewise? And if the Petersburg-Warsaw Company and
that of Paris-Belfort can act in harmony, without giving themselves the
luxury of a common commander, why, in the midst of our so