THE CONQUEST OF TIME AND SrACE 



transportation in the near future, is a creation of the 

 twentieth century. 



In order to visualize the contrast between the prac- 

 tical civiKzation of to-day and that of our grandparents, 

 it suffices to recall that the first steam locomotive that 

 carried passengers over a railway was put in operation 

 in the year 1829; and that the first ship propelled by 

 steam power alone did not cross the ocean until 1838. 

 Not until well towards the middle of the nineteenth 

 century, then, were the conditions of transportation 

 altered materially from what they had been since the 

 very dawn of civilization, — conditions under which one 

 hundred miles constituted about the maximum extent 

 of a hard day's land journey. 



The elaboration of railway and steamship lines 

 through which nearly all portions of the habitable 

 globe have been made accessible, has constituted one 

 of the most remarkable examples of economic develop- 

 ment that man has ever achieved. It requires but the 

 slightest use of the imagination to realize with some meas- ■] 

 ure of vividness the extent to which the entire structure 

 of present-day civilization is based upon this elabora- 

 tion of means of transportation. To point but a single 

 illustration, the entire central and western portion of 

 the United States must have remained a wilderness for 

 decades or centuries had not the steam locomotive 

 made communication easy between these regions and 

 the seaboard. 



Contrariwise no such development of city life as that 

 which we see throughout Christendom would have 

 been possible but for the increased facilities, due pri- 



[2] 



