The Life and Work of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States / Embracing an Account of the Scenes and Incidents of His Boyhood; the Struggles of His Youth; the Might of His Early Manhood; His Valor As a Soldier; His Career As a Statesman; His Election to the Presidency; and the Tragic Story of His Death.

by John Clark Ridpath

“In 1870, there were about 125,000 miles of railroad on the two hemispheres, constructed at a cost of little less than $100,000 per mile, and representing nearly $12,000,000,000 of invested capital.

“A parliamentary commission found that during the year 1866 the railway cars of Great Britain carried an average of 850,000 passengers per day; and during that year the work done by their 8,125 locomotives would have required for its performance three and a half million horses and nearly two million men.

“What have our people done for the locomotive, and what has it done for us? To the United States, with its vast territorial area, the railroad was a vital necessity.

“Talleyrand once said to the first Napoleon that ‘the United States was a giant without bones.’ Since that time our gristle has been rapidly hardening. Sixty-seven thousand miles of iron track is a tolerable skeleton, even for a giant. When this new power appeared, our people everywhere felt the necessity of setting it to work; and individuals, cities, States, and the nation lavished their resources without stint to make a pathway for it. Fortunes were sunk under almost every mile of our earlier roads in the effort to capture and utilize this new power. If the State did not head the subscription for a new road, it usually came to the rescue before the work was completed.

“The lands given by the States and by the national Government to aid in the construction of railroads, reach an aggregate of nearly two hundred and fifty million acres—a territory equal to nine times the area of Ohio. With these vast resources we have made paths for the steam giant; and to-day nearly a quarter of a million of our business and working men are in his immediate service. Such a power naturally attracts to its enterprise the brightest and strongest intellects. It would be difficult to find in any other profession so large a proportion of men possessed of a high order of business ability as those who construct, manage, and operate our railroads.

“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 reinforcement 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 discussing this theme, we must not make an indiscriminate attack upon corporations. The corporation limited to its proper uses is one of the most valuable of the many useful creations of law. One class of corporations has played a most important and conspicuous part in securing the liberties of mankind. It was the municipal corporations—the free cities and chartered towns—that preserved and developed the spirit of freedom during the darkness of the Middle Ages, and powerfully aided in the overthrow of the feudal system. The charters of London and of the lesser cities and towns of England made the most effective resistance to the tyranny of Charles II. and the judicial savagery of Jeffries. The spirit of the free town and the chartered colony taught our own fathers how to win their independence. The New England township was the political unit which formed the basis of most of our states.

“This class of corporations have been most useful, and almost always safe, because they have been kept constantly within the control of the community for whose benefit they were created. The State has never surrendered the power of amending their charters.

“Under the name of private corporations organizations have grown up, not for the perpetuation of a great charity, like a college or hospital, not to enable a company of citizens more conveniently to carry on a private industry, but a class of corporations unknown to the early law writers has arisen, and to them have been committed the vast powers of the railroad and the telegraph, the great instruments by which modern communities live, move, and have their being.