m shipwreck.

Many people hold the erroneous doctrine that travellers and traffic
create railways, whereas all experience goes to prove that railways
create travellers and traffic. Of course at their first beginnings
railways were formed by the few hundreds of travellers who were chiefly
traffickers, but no sooner were they called into being than they became
creative,--they turned thousands of stay-at-homes into travellers; they
rushed between the great centres of industry, sweeping up the people in
their train, and, with a grand contempt of littleness in every form,
caught up the slow-going cars and coaches of former days in their huge
embrace, and whirled them along in company with any number you chose of
tons and bales of merchandise; they groaned up the acclivities of
Highland hills, and snorted into sequestered glens, alluring, nay,
compelling, the lonely dwellers to come out, and causing hosts of men,
with rod and gun and hammer and botanical box, to go in; they scouted
the old highroads, and went, like mighty men of valour, straight to the
accomplishment of their ends, leaping over and diving under each other,
across everything, through anything, and sticking at nothing, until over
lands where, fifty years ago, only carts and coaches used to creep and
poor pedestrians were wont to plod, cataracts of travellers now flow
almost without intermission night and day--the prince rolling in his
royal bedroom from palace to palace; the huntsman flying to the field,
with his groom and horse in a box behind him; the artisan travelling in
comfort to his daily toil, with his tools and a mysterious tin of
victuals at his feet; thousands on thousands of busy beings hurrying
through the land where one or two crawled before; shoals of foreigners
coming in to get rid of prejudices and add "wrinkles to their horns,"
while everything is cheapened, and, best of all, knowledge is increased
by this healthy--though, it may be, rather rapid--moving about of men
and women.

Thus railways have created travellers and traffic. But they have done
much more; they have turned road-side inns into "grand hotels"; they
have clambered up on the world's heights, and built palatial abodes on
the home of the mountain-hare and the eagle, where weak and worn
invalids may mount without exertion, and drink in health and happiness
with the freshest air of heaven.

The principle cannot be disputed that the creation of railways between
great centres of