[Speech on the Railway Problem, June 22, 1874.]
We are so involved in the events and movements of society that we do not stop to realize—what is undeniably true—that during the last forty years all modern societies have entered upon a period of change more marked, more pervading, more radical than any that has occurred during the last three hundred years. In saying this, I do not forget our own political and military history, nor the French Revolution of 1793. The changes now taking place have been wrought, and are being wrought, mainly, almost wholly, by a single mechanical contrivance, the steam locomotive. Imagine, if you can, what would happen if to-morrow morning the railway locomotive, and its corollary, the telegraph, were blotted from the earth. At first thought, it would seem impossible to get on at all with the feeble substitutes we should be compelled to adopt in place of these great forces. To what humble proportions mankind would be compelled to scale down the great enterprises they are now pushing forward with such ease! But were this calamity to happen, we should simply be placed where we were forty-three years ago.
There are many persons now living who well remember the day when Andrew Jackson, after four weeks of toilsome travel from his home in Tennessee, reached Washington and took his first oath of office as President of the United States. On that day the railway locomotive did not exist. During that year Henry Clay was struggling to make his name immortal by linking it with the then vast project of building a national road—a turnpike—from the national capital to the banks of the Mississippi.
In the autumn of that very year George Stephenson ran his first experimental locomotive, the "Rocket," from Manchester to Liverpool and back. The rumble of its wheels, redoubled a million times, is echoing to-day on every continent.
The American people have done much for the locomotive, and it has done much for them. We have already seen that it has greatly reduced, if not wholly destroyed, the danger that the government will fall to pieces by its own weight. The railroad has not only brought our people and their industries together, but it has carried civilization into the wilderness, has built up States and Territories, which, but for its power, would have remained deserts for a century to come. "Abroad and at home," as Mr. Adams tersely declares, "it has equally nationalized people and cosmopolized nations." It has played a most important part in the recent movement for the unification and preservation of nations.
It enabled us to do what the old military science had pronounced impossible—to conquer a revolted population of eleven millions, occupying a territory one-fifth as large as the continent of Europe. In an able essay on the railway system, Mr. Charles F. Adams, Jr. has pointed out some of the remarkable achievements of the railroad in our recent history. For example, a single railroad track enabled Sherman to maintain eighty thousand fighting men three hundred miles beyond his base of supplies. Another line, in a space of seven days, brought a re-enforcement of two fully equipped army corps around a circuit of thirteen hundred miles, to strengthen an army at a threatened point. He calls attention to the still more striking fact that for ten years past, with fifteen hundred millions of our indebtedness abroad, an enormous debt at home, unparalleled public expenditures, and a depreciated paper currency, in defiance of all past experience, we have been steadily conquering our difficulties, have escaped the predicted collapse, and are promptly meeting our engagements; because, through energetic railroad development, the country has been producing real wealth, as no country has produced it before. Finally, he sums up the case by declaring that the locomotive has "dragged the country through its difficulties in spite of itself."
In the darkness and chaos of that period, the feudal system was the first important step toward the organization of modern nations. Powerful chiefs and barons intrenched themselves in castles, and, in return for submission and service, gave to their vassals rude protection and ruder laws. But as the feudal chiefs grew in power and wealth, they became the oppressors of their people, taxed and robbed them at will, and finally, in their arrogance, defied the kings and emperors of the Mediæval States. From their castles, planted on the great thoroughfares, they practised the most capricious extortions on commerce and travel, and thus gave to modern language the phrase, "levy blackmail."
The consolidation of our great industrial and commercial companies, the power they wield, and the relations they sustain to the State and to the industry of the people, do not fall far short of Fourier's definition of commercial or industrial feudalism. The modern barons, more powerful than their military prototypes, own our greatest highways, and levy tribute at will upon all our vast industries. And, as the old feudalism was finally controlled and subordinated only by the combined efforts of the kings and the people of the free cities and towns, so our modern feudalism can be subordinated to the public good only by the great body of the people, acting through their governments by wise and just laws.