274 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



to nourisn the new centres of business. We find ourselves with 

 plenty of money in hands that are not experienced in managing 

 land. So we have to move cautiously and slowly. 



Statesmen of the near future must concern themselves more 

 with the course and condition of common roads. This beautiful 

 city of Rockville has probably been favored this fall with a 

 freight of fifty cents a bushel on potatoes from distant Dakota. 

 And your enterprising and provident dealers and speculators have 

 learned something of our common roads of late in their exciting 

 hunts after lost freights, delayed and freezing on the track. 



A railway line cannot always insure the whole people against 

 scarcity any more than the great post-diluvian tower which busily 

 employed ancient engineers and capital could insure the whole 

 people against another flood. 



The railway has answered well for butchering land in America, 

 and building noisy, wasteful cities quickly, but it remains to be 

 seen, after the next railway panic, what share an iron road with a 

 wooden foundation may have in our future civilization. It may 

 be an image of brass with feet of clay. For a machine which 

 must have a perishable timber foundation, the locomotive too 

 often carries an incendiary torch among our forests. 



In the case between common roads and railways — a nation runs 

 surest and safest that learns to. creep and walk first. Eminent 

 and far-seeing railway engineers admit the ghastly look of iron 

 roads through an old and deserted country with no convenient 

 common roads. The people see that railways help them as char- 

 tered turnpikes once helped them, and that the latter had their 

 tyrannical day and generation. An over-bearing railway system 

 hurts us as all systems do when they grow unwieldy and unman- 

 ageable. Slavery at the South was not so bad a system of labor 

 until it grew so mighty as to threaten or prevent all natural and 

 kindly development of master or man. We don't want our natu- 

 ral leaders or followers consumed and destroyed by running some 

 superhuman Juggernaut. Our railways and all our institutions 

 are experimental creatures of statute law. When they become 

 oppressive of small industrial growths, it is idle to say they will 

 be destroyed, for they kill the popular strength which supports 

 them. If the development of farming and gardening near by is 

 continually punished by the introduction of far-fetched produce 

 because it is cheaper, then by the same rule of might, whenever an 



