2 W. J. MCGEE 



then our wealth was less than seven biUion dollars, now it 

 is eighty bilhons. At the beginning of 1848 there were 

 fifty two hundred and five mile^ of railway in the United 

 States, now there are far more than any other country has, 

 more than all Europe; nearly as many miles, indeed, as all 

 of the rest of the world put together. Some of those who 

 attended the first meeting of the association made their 

 journey, or part of it, by stage coach or in the saddle. They 

 met many a boy riding to the neighborhood mill with a bag 

 of corn as grist and saddle, and the itinerant doctor or min- 

 ister on horseback, with his wife on a pillion behind; they 

 passed by farmers swinging the back breaking cradle or 

 wielding the tedious hoe, while lusty horses grew fat in idle- 

 ness; they caught glimpses of housewives spinning and dyeing 

 and w^eaving with infinite pains the fabrics required to clothe 

 their families; they followed trails so rough that the trans- 

 portation of produce to market multiplied its cost, and car- 

 rying back family supplies was a burden; everywhere they 

 saw hard human toil, enlivened only by the cheer of pohtical 

 freedom, and they did not even dream of devices whereby 

 nature should be made to furnish the means for her own 

 subjugation. Most of the mails were carried slowly by 

 coaches and postboys; the telegraph was httle more than 

 a toy; the telephone, the trolley car, and the typewriter 

 had not begun to shorten time and lengthen life; and steel 

 was regularly imported from Sheffield, and iron from Nor- 

 way. The slow and uncertain commerce of interior navi- 

 gation was the pride of pubhcists, and Chicago boasted a 

 population of twenty five thousand; a shallow wave of 

 settlement was flowing over the vast interior to break against 

 the bluffs of the Missouri, though the pioneers still feared 

 to pitch tents on the broad prairie lands, and chose rather 

 the rugged and rocky woodlands skirting the water ways 

 as sites for homesteads; the fertile subhumid plains, with 

 ten million buffalo feeding on their nutritious grasses, were 

 still mapped as the great American desert; the Rocky 

 mountain region beyond was a mystical land, yielding the 

 wildest and weirdest of travelers' tales; CaHfornia was an 



