struction--the cuttings, embankings,
tunnellings, diversions of roads; the building of bridges and stations,
the laying down of ballast, sleepers, and rails; the making of engines,
tenders, carriages, and waggons: which processes, acting on numerous
trades, increase the importation of timber, the quarrying of stone, the
manufacture of iron, the mining of coal, the burning of bricks;
institute a variety of special manufactures weekly advertised in the
_Railway Times_; and, finally, open the way to sundry new occupations,
as those of drivers, stokers, cleaners, plate-layers, &c., &c. And then
consider the changes, still more numerous and involved, which railways
in action produce on the community at large. Business agencies are
established where previously they would not have paid; goods are
obtained from remote wholesale houses instead of near retail ones; and
commodities are used which distance once rendered inaccessible. Again,
the diminished cost of carriage tends to specialize more than ever the
industries of different districts--to confine each manufacture to the
parts in which, from local advantages, it can be best carried on.
Further, the fall in freights, facilitating distribution, equalizes
prices, and also, on the average, lowers prices: thus bringing divers
articles within the means of those before unable to buy them, and so
increasing their comforts and improving their habits. At the same time
the practice of travelling is immensely extended. People who never
before dreamed of it, take trips to the sea; visit their distant
relations; make tours; and so we are benefited in body, feelings, and
ideas. The more prompt transmission of letters and of news produces
other marked changes--makes the pulse of the nation faster. Once more,
there arises a wide dissemination of cheap literature through railway
book-stalls, and of advertisements in railway carriages: both of them
aiding ulterior progress. And the countless changes here briefly
indicated are consequent on the invention of the locomotive engine. The
social organism has been rendered more heterogeneous in virtue of the
many new occupations introduced, and the many old ones further
specialized; prices of nearly all things in every place have been
altered; each trader has modified his way of doing business; and every
person has been affected in his actions, thoughts, emotions.

Illustrations to the same effect might be indefinitely accumulated, but
they are need