3 i6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



derived principally from its effects on social conditions, civilization, 

 and customs. One of the most important of these effects is illustrated 

 in emigration, which has assumed grand dimensions under the opera- 

 tion of the new methods of communication. Of the twelve and a half 

 million emigrants who went to the United States between the recog- 

 nition of their independence and 1883, not more than a million belong 

 to the time previous to the establishment of regular passenger commu- 

 nication by steamer with Europe, about 1844. As a result of the 

 establishment of this method of communication, and of the building of 

 the railroads that opened the Mississippi Valley and the western part 

 of the continent, emigration assumed colossal proportions. Besides 

 the amelioration of the voyage, which has become an affair of not 

 more than ten or twelve days for emigrant-vessels, the improved fare, 

 the cheaper rate of passage, and the punctuality and increased safety 

 of the transit, may be marked as circumstances contributing to this 

 result. 



The difficulties of the land -journey were formerly hardly less formi- 

 dable to emigrants seeking the interior of the country than were those 

 of the sea-voyage. Weeks and even months might be spent in reach- 

 ing the end of the journey, while the traveler had to do without every- 

 thing he could not take along with him, or else to procure it at the 

 expense of great trouble and cost. Now the railroad carries one from 

 the port of arrival, in as many days as months were formerly required, 

 to the extreme West ; and, finding himself there, he is no longer 

 lost in the wilderness, with nothing but his own efforts to depend 

 upon ; but he has a railroad passing at no very great distance, to 

 keep him in constant communication with civilization. To these great 

 impulses may be added the increased facilities for coming and going 

 within their own country. Formerly the poor man was tied to his 

 threshold by the impossibility of obtaining the means to get away. 

 Now, at an expense of time and money relatively trifling, he is able to 

 go and seek other places where he may find better fields for the exer- 

 cise of his powers and easier conditions of existence. In this way the 

 condition of the poorer and the laboring classes has been immeasur- 

 ably altered. Hence we see a streaming of working-men toward the 

 centers of great industries, large towns growing up, labor become 

 scarce in the agricultural districts, and the industrial organizations 

 undergoing a revolution. The labor market has undergone the same 

 kind of extension as the market for goods ; and skilled labor has be- 

 come more and more a thing of merchandise, the price of which is 

 regulated by the larger conjunctures of business. The personal rela- 

 tion between laborer and employer, which formerly, at least in handi- 

 craft work, had somewhat the aspect of a family relation, has been 

 dissolved or relaxed. 



We have also to speak of the services which the post has rendered. 

 They are by no means limited to the economical field, but they are 



