Multiply this one instance with thousands of similar instances. We have every city in the world linked with every other city; every nationality brought in contact with every other nationality; every class and character of individual tied up with every other class of individuals, and these men are the great deposit reservoirs of everything.
They become laden with unlimited cosmopolitan and universal knowledge and information, charged with it as a bee is charged with honey in its flights from bush to bush and from flower to flower.
This is not an exaggeration, on the contrary, it is of such common knowledge that we think nothing about it. It is every-day fact that any one can see for himself by going to any railroad depot in the country.
We said these men are the great deposit reservoirs of everything, but unlike the most of our deposit reservoirs, they are also the sources of distribution through innumerable channels. Their business is like the training at a State Normal School with actual experience added in unlimited quantities. They go out from these training schools, or rather from this educational system belonging to every Overground Railroad and scatter knowledge, information, and opportunity. A word, even a hint, of what “a man told me on the run from New Orleans to Chicago,” and one or perhaps many, find themselves boosted into opportunities they never would have found without the operators on the Overground Railroad.
These Pullman employees are evangelists, news gatherers, and experienced men acquainted with the ways and doings of the world. They have homes, abiding places, wives, sweethearts, brothers, sisters, friends. They have their clubs and meeting places, and they unload their information and knowledge, mixed with opportunity, to ears greedy for advancement, and opportunities for betterment.
They scatter broadcast high aspirations and incentives to progress among the ten millions of the posterity of the patrons of the old Underground Railroad.
Through this means the most astounding results have been accomplished—results that have never happened any other race since the world began.
The Israelites dwelt in Egypt for four hundred and thirty years, and waited for a Moses to come and lead them out of their unpleasant environments. There were about six hundred thousand of them, and most of their posterity are still dreaming of the past.
The four millions that started the Underground Railroad, have increased to ten millions in a generation and a half, and they led themselves out to the promised land.
Imagine ten millions of any other race in the United States with perfect freedom of action! We might well shudder at what would happen us—happen the country. We do not feel that way about the posterity of the operators and passengers of the old Underground Railroad. They are peaceable, earnest students of the ways of civilization, and they are working upward—they are ambitious to learn and constantly devise methods of improving their condition in the same way all true American citizens are following. They have their homes, their children, and their attachments in our midst, in fact, they belong to our soil, and have no desire to depart elsewhere to spend their money. They are always ready to shed their blood for the Stars and Stripes, and are always willing to leap to the nation’s rescue, or to aid in promoting its welfare.