Since 1860 the productive power of the United States has more than trebled.
I like to talk about these things, because they mean good houses, carpets on the floors, pictures on the walls, some books on the shelves. They mean children going to school with their stomachs full of good food, prosperous men and proud mothers.
All my life I have taken a much deeper interest in what men produce than in what nature does. I would rather see the prairies, with the oats and the wheat and the waving corn, and the schoolhouse, and hear the thrush sing amid the happy homes of prosperous men and women—I would rather see these things than any range of mountains in the world. Take it as you will, a mountain is of no great value.
In 1860 our land was worth four billion five hundred million dollars; in 1890 it was worth fourteen billion dollars.
In 1860 all the railroads in the United States were worth four hundred million dollars, now they are worth a little less than ten thousand million dollars.
I want you to understand what these figures mean.
For thirty years we spent, on an average, one million dollars a day in building railroads.—I want you to think what that means. All that money had to be dug out of the ground. It had to be made by raising something or manufacturing something. We did not get it by writing essays on finance, or discussing the silver question. It had to be made with the ax, the plow, the reaper, the mower; in every form of industry; all to produce these splendid results.
We have railroads enough now to make seven tracks around the great globe, and enough left for side tracks. That is what we have done here, in what the European nations are pleased to call "the new world."
I am telling you these things because you may not know them, and I did not know them myself until a few days ago. I am anxious to give away information, for it is only by giving it away that you can keep it. When you have told it, you remember it. It is with information as it is with liberty, the only way to be dead sure of it is to give it to other people.
In 1860 the houses in the United States, the cabins on the frontier, the buildings in the cities, were worth six thousand million dollars. Now they are worth over twenty-two thousand million dollars. To talk about figures like these is enough to make a man dizzy.