348 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1907. 
tions. It is a group of facts that cannot be called geographical that 
must determine what local conditions and what place relations are of 
most importance with reference to the question. 
Now, it is fortunate that we are in a position to recognize one im- 
portant circumstance that greatly simplifies the discussion. In this 
country, and in all advanced commercial countries, the question is 
always discussed, at least avowedly, as one of economy. It is not so 
everywhere, nor has it always been so in our own country. In the 
part of the Yangtse River where the rapids occur, the substitution of 
river steamers or a railway for native junks is resisted by many 
Chinese on the ground that the numerous Chinese trackers who get 
a meager living by doing some of the hardest work in which human 
beings can engage would thereby be deprived of that living. I think 
I remember to have read that a similar objection to new means of 
transport caused the boatmen of Loch Lomond to break up the first . 
steamboat that was launched on that lake. But we have now got 
beyond that stage. Such considerations are no longer taken into 
account in the discussion of rival modes of carriage. The question 
is one of economy and economy only. 
But great difficulties remain. Economy in transport is not deter- 
mined by the mere difference in the money cost of conveying goods, 
say, from one town to another. The economy to be considered with 
reference to transport is that of carrying goods from the place of 
origin to the place of consumption—the carriage of coal, for instance, 
from the mines to our hearths, or of wheat from the wheat fields to 
our tables in the form of loaves, for the place where the loaf is to be 
eaten has an important influence in determining where the wheat is 
to be ground into flour. 
Those who think only of carriage from one point to another are 
much impressed with such figures as these. On an ordinary good 
wagon road a single horsepower will draw about 3,000 pounds at the 
rate of 2 miles an hour, on a railway about 30,000 pounds at the same 
rate, on water as much as 200,000 pounds. When it is considered, 
moreover, that the ratio of the paying load to the dead weight is 
higher in ships and boats than in road and railway wagons, the ad- 
vantage in favor of waterways seems overwhelming. Yet these fig- 
ures are far from settling the question. First, there is the consider- 
ation of time. In most cases a speed of 2 miles an hour is not to be 
thought of. Quickness of transport is becoming every day more im- 
portant. It is obvious that with rapid means of transport a given 
amount of capital is more frequently turned over in any business, and 
manifestly, too, this must be a more important consideration the 
greater the value that is locked up in the goods carried. Now, by 
water transport, even under the most favorable conditions, it is now- 
adays more costly to develop a high speed than it is by land, and there 
