THE EULE OF THE EOAD 59 



factor of the long interregnum-disuse of the English custom, whereby 

 men's minds were freed from the influence of the special force which 

 had made the old English custom differ from that of the continent. 

 In the old countries war and jealousy, quarrels and crime, made men 

 watchful of each other, kept old customs in vigor, etc., while with our 

 colonists the common enemy banded our ancestors together in friend- 

 ship and mutual trust. The habits of the continental immigrant 

 also came into action, so that with the factors of disuse, of walkers, 

 of horse-riders, of ox-teams, etc., all uniting, the more natural and 

 universal law came to be customary. Two other necessities cooperated 

 to win the easy establishment of the change: When wagons came into 

 use they were hauled by two, by three, often by four or even by six horses 

 or mules. The driver, of course, being a right-handed man, sat upon 

 the near wheel-horse, and guided the leaders by the " jerk-line," held 

 again, of course, in the left hand. The "prairie schooner" was an 

 illustration of this universal American custom, and the six-mule team 

 of all our armies in the war of the sixties was and remains a distinctive 

 proof of conditions which gave it birth during the earlier history of 

 the country. When the driver left his near wheel-horse and jerk-line, 

 and mounted the seat in the " schooner," wagon, carriage, etc., handling 

 the pair of reins for each pair of horses, there was the best reason in 

 the world, wholly overlooked by writers, that he should sit on the right 

 of the seat as did and does the driver in England, although he did not, 

 as do they, pass to the left. This reason is that he might operate the 

 brake with his right hand or right foot. In a hilly country and with 

 ungraded roads, the braking was fully as necessary as the driving. 

 The combined force of all these factors is fully sufficient to account 

 for the change in our country's custom from that of England. 



But the most interesting and by all odds the most financially im- 

 portant part of the story still remains — that concerning the railways. 

 The history of double-tracking in the United States is not yet written. 

 An illustration of what took place on one trunk line, the Union Pacific, 

 is not very different from that on others. This company in construct- 

 ing its line across Idaho put in sidings one and one half miles long, 

 every three miles, and located these all upon the same side of the 

 track, the object being to utilize these as parts of a second continuous 

 track at a later day. The English rule was of course to pass to the 

 left, as with carriages in the common highways and streets, a rule 

 naturally adopted in Europe, India, etc. In our country there was 

 said to have been sufficiently active political feeling to think that 

 " what was English was bad," and from the first this made some of the 

 double-track railways right-hand passers. I very much doubt this ; the 

 right passing of our common wagons even in revolutionary times had 



