"My country, 'tis of thee!" / Or, the United States of America; past, present and future. A philosophic view of American history and of our present status, to be seen in the Columbian exhibition.

by Willis Fletcher Johnson

In this country, indeed, most of the earlier railroads were projected merely to connect navigable streams with one another, or with the coast, their founders evidently regarding rail transportation as an auxiliary of the natural ways, and not as a great rival which was in a very few years to dominate them. In other instances, railways in the early days were simply built along the banks of the rivers, because the people found that when the latter were frozen in the winter, they needed some other means of transportation. These scattered bits of road here and there were, in after years, as the possibilities of railroad development began to dawn upon the minds of far-seeing men, united by connecting links and reorganized into roads of much greater length. In fact some of the most difficult features of the railroad problem of the present day grew out of the failure of projectors of railroads in the early days to grasp the meaning of the system which they were instituting. France, Germany, Belgium and other European cities have had no serious railway problem. The English people, however, have passed through very nearly the same experience as ours, and we are now solving the same questions which puzzled their heads nearly a generation ago.

The immunity of the continental nations from many difficult railway questions arises from the fact that they began building railroads after England and our own country had undertaken them, and after we had sufficiently developed their possibilities to show the absurdity of many of the ideas that prevailed when they were inaugurated. It was supposed that the first companies chartered would build a railway just as they would build a highway, and that the iron way would be open to competitive traffic by individuals or combinations of individuals, just as the ordinary highway was open. In the charter of the first railway company which built a line, the Manchester and Liverpool Railway, and in fact in all the charters which were granted in England prior to 1829, and the charters granted in this country in the same period, this idea is clearly expressed. The Ithaca and Owego Railway, now a portion of the great New York Central trunk line, was chartered in 1828, and one section of the charter contains this provision: “All persons paying the toll aforesaid may, with suitable and proper carriages, use and travel upon the said railroad, subject to such rules and regulations as the said corporators are authorized to make by the ninth section of this act.”

It is obvious that the notion entertained by the founders of this railway was that they would simply own a turnpike with rails upon it, and would derive their revenue from the tolls charged upon the vehicles that should be rolled over it by individuals. It was not until railway building had proceeded for about a dozen years that it became evident, from the nature of the power employed and the higher rate of speed—unforeseen until then—that might be attained, that the railway company must monopolize the service over the road they built. This rendered necessary an entire revolution of the principles upon which all future charters should be granted. But the fundamental mistake was made. The continental peoples began to build their railways after this fact was discovered, and therefore had the benefit of their predecessors’ mistakes, and adopted precautions which have relieved them of many awkward complications.

Besides this, another mistake of ignorance was the belief that railways would be used exclusively for the transportation of passengers, and it was long after the first rails had been laid that the notion that “light goods” might be conveyed, dawned upon their minds.

Any man who should have told these pioneers of the railway world that the United States would possess in the year 1889 a hundred and sixty thousand miles of railroad, enough to belt the world seven times at the Equator, would have been regarded as a lunatic. The ownership of this vast property is represented by stocks and bonds aggregating $9,000,000,000. They receive yearly from the public for carrying passengers and freights the sum of $1,000,000,000 and, after paying the expenses of their operation, including the wages of more than 1,000,000 employés, they have left an available revenue of $415,000,000. More than one of the larger companies has a revenue greater than that of the United States government was thirty years ago. To earn this enormous sum the roads work night and day, seven days a week. Through the darkest and stormiest winter midnight, as well as through the pleasantest summer afternoon, the locomotive fires are kept alight and the wheels revolve unceasingly along the rails. The work they accomplish is something startling in the aggregate. In the year 1887, the latest for which the complete figures are at hand, the railroads of the country carried 428,000,000 passengers, travelling 10,500,000 miles, a distance equal to 450 times around the globe. The freight carried in the same year amounted to 552,000,000 tons, and the distance traversed 62,000,000 miles.

It is a commonplace to speak of what the railroads have done in the way of opening up the country and bringing the blessings of civilization into the wilderness. In the Western country, where the people formerly wore homespun or the coarsest fabrics of Eastern looms, the women now receive weekly fashion plates still damp from the press, and every cross-roads store has in stock the latest patterns, not only from the great cities of our own land, but from the centres of European fashion. The postal system follows along the iron way, the metropolitan newspaper reaches the most obscure hamlet daily, and a chapter might be written upon the growth of the railway postal service alone. The telegraph lines enter new territory with the railway, putting the dweller in the remotest regions within reach of instantaneous communication with all parts of the world.

The effect of the railroad in thus multiplying and exchanging not only material products, but distributing the news of the day and bringing the inhabitants of the Pacific slope and those of the Atlantic seaboard into daily intellectual intercourse, and thus welding all into one homogeneous people, is a theme which has yet to be fully dealt with by the pen of the historian. From Maine to Texas, go where you will, you find the people read the same news, discuss the same questions, and are subjected to the same vivifying influences, the ideas of the farmer on the borders broadening in even pace with those of the dwellers in the cities until such a thing as provincialism is unknown on this continent. Indeed, foreigners who visit our shores, who have a taste for the picturesque, complain of this monotony, and bewail the fact that the American town or hamlet, whether situated on the borders of the great northern lakes or on the torrid shores of the Gulf, presents essentially the same exterior aspect and identical social conditions.

It would be too much to expect that this great railway system, with its unprecedented army of employés and the revenues of an empire, should be an unadulterated blessing; that it should not carry some alloy in its composition. Like most humane institutions, even the most beneficent, it has wrought mischiefs as well as brought great benefits. Until now the needs of our rapidly developing country were such that communities everywhere were clamoring for roads which would bring to them what they needed from the outside world and place within reach markets for their own products. Consequently, every possible inducement was offered for the building of railway lines, and without surrounding their construction with such safeguards as had already been found necessary in old and thickly populated countries. The result has been in many parts of the country an over-building of lines which has entailed subsequent losses and difficulties and the creation of abuses and complications which together constitute what has come to be known as “the railway problem.” It is clear that what might be broadly called the constructive period in our railway system is ended, and that we have now fairly entered upon a period of restriction and regulation. The people have now to learn to subdue and control these great Frankensteins of their own creation.

As Mr. Frederick Taylor, President of the Western National Bank of New York, who has all his life been a close student of the railway question, says: “Though the railroads have probably contributed more than all other agencies combined to make the United States what they are, no one will deny that the incalculable benefit which we have derived from their growth and development has not been, and is not, wholly ‘unmixed of evil.’ Leaving out other considerations, it is not unfair to say that three-quarters of all the legislative corruption from which we have suffered during the past fifty years have been directly chargeable to the railways; and that a very large proportion, perhaps nearly as much as half, of the litigation that has occupied our courts during the same period has been directly connected with railway matters.”

The great panic of 1873 was directly due to the over-building of railroads. Following it came several years of terrible business depression throughout the country, in which time and money was spent in trying to clear away the wreck. Hundreds of railroad companies were bankrupted and loss and suffering were entailed upon hundreds of thousands of persons who had invested their savings in these enterprises. In no end of instances the stocks of the companies were wiped out of existence entirely, the roads sold under foreclosure and reorganized. Again, in 1877, when the country was just beginning to recover from the shock, it was disturbed and depressed for a long time by the trouble between the railroad companies and their workmen, which in some cases culminated in riot and bloodshed. Another period of artificially stimulated railroad building reached its culmination in the panic of 1884, and two years later widespread strikes among railway operatives again disturbed the entire business of the country. During all this period the legislatures of the various States and the National Congress were busy with legislation intended to modify or remedy the evils complained of.