Our country has already been active in this work. Through a remarkable line of steam communications, chiefly by railroad, its whole population is now, or will be shortly, brought close to the borders of Iowa. Cities of the Southern seaboard, Charleston, Savannah, and Mobile, are already stretching their lines in this direction, soon to be completed conductors,—while the traveller from all the principal points of the Northern seaboard, from Portland, Boston, Providence, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, now passes without impediment to this remote region, traversing a territory of unexampled resources, at once magazine and granary, the largest coal-field and at the same time the largest corn-field of the known globe, winding his way among churches and school-houses, among forests and gardens, by villages, towns, and cities, along the sea, along rivers and lakes, with a speed which may recall the gallop of the ghostly horseman in the ballad:—
"Fled past on right and left how fast
Each forest, grove, and bower!
On right and left fled past how fast
Each city, town, and tower!
"Tramp! tramp! along the land they rode,
Splash! splash! along the sea."
On the banks of the Mississippi he is now arrested. The proposed road in Iowa will bear the adventurer yet further, to the banks of the Missouri; and this remote giant stream, mightiest of the earth, leaping from its sources in the Rocky Mountains, will be clasped with the Atlantic in the same iron bracelet. In all this I see not only further opportunities for commerce, but a new extension to civilization and increased strength to our National Union.
A heathen poet, while picturing the Golden Age, perversely indicates the absence of long roads as creditable to that imaginary period in contrast with his own. "How well," exclaims the youthful Tibullus, "they lived while Saturn ruled,—before the earth was opened by long ways!"
"Quam bene Saturno vivebant rege, priusquam
Tellus in longas est patefacta vias!"[88]