bweb the map of the state, we
should come to know many tales of broken fortunes and of broken hopes.
The railroads are no different in this from other business enterprises,
but they are different from the canals. These, as we have seen, were
the work of the state for the advantage of the whole people, while the
railroads were from the beginning private schemes for making money. Each
kind of highway came in its time, and each in its way served the purpose
of Ohio. At the time the companies began to build their railroads,
the state system of canals was in its highest usefulness, and it is no
wonder that the people should have regarded the railroads as fanciful
schemes. No one could then have dreamed how rapidly they would increase
and multiply, and that in less than fifty years they should so far
surpass the canals in service to the public that some of these would
be abandoned by the state, and become grass-grown ditches hardly
distinguishable in their look of ancient ruin from the works of the
Mound Builders. At the most there were once nine hundred miles of
canals in Ohio, and now there are twelve or fourteen thousand miles of
railroads. Yet the canals were a greater achievement for Ohio in 1837
than the railroads are in 1897.

The children of this day can hardly imagine what rude and simple affairs
the earliest railroads were. Instead of the long smooth steel rails
which now carry the great trains, with their luxurious cars, in their
never-ceasing flight, day in and day out the whole year round, flat
bands of iron, spiked to wooden rails, formed the path of the
small carriages drawn by a locomotive of the size and shape of a
threshing-machine engine. These amazed by a speed of ten or twelve miles
an hour the gaping spectator whose grandchildren do not turn their heads
to look at the express as it makes its sixty miles in sixty minutes. In
the very beginning, indeed, the carriages were drawn by horses, and it
was several years before steam was used.

[Illustration: Early Railroad 214]

Little by little the railroads began to be built on the easy levels of
the state, and before a great while a line was projected from Cincinnati
to Columbus along the course of the Little Miami River. This was
completed piecemeal, from point to point, and at last carried through.
In the mean time other lines were laid out, and then all at once
the railroad era was at hand. It was a time of great excitement and
expectation, if not of tha