And State Papers 151 



development of industry such as to make it a matter 

 of the least importance whether the nation or the 

 State had charge of the great corporations or su 

 pervised the great business and industrial organiza 

 tions. A century and a quarter ago, here at Wheel 

 ing, commerce was carried on by pack train, by 

 wagon train, by boat. That was the way it was 

 carried on throughout the whole civilized world 

 oars and sails, wheeled vehicles and beasts of bur 

 den those were the means of carrying on com 

 merce at the end of the eighteenth century, when 

 this country became a nation. 



There had been no radical change, no essen 

 tial change, in the means of carrying on com 

 merce from the days when the Phoenician galleys 

 plowed the waters of the Mediterranean. For 

 four or five thousand years, perhaps longer, from 

 the immemorial past when Babylon and Nineveh 

 stood in Mesopotamia, when Thebes and Mem 

 phis were mighty in the valley of the Nile from 

 that time on through the supremacy of Greece and 

 of Rome, through the upbuilding of the great 

 trading cities like Venice and Genoa in Italy; like 

 the cities of the Rhine and the Netherlands in 

 Northern Europe on through the period of the 

 great expansion of European civilization which 

 followed the voyages of Columbus and Vasco 

 da Gama, down to the time when this country 

 became a nation the means of commercial inter 

 course remained substantially unchanged. Those 

 means, therefore, limited narrowly what could be 



8 VOL. XIII. 



