i28 THE NEW AGRICULTURE. 



passenger traffic which dazzled the imaginations of men, and 

 for many years absorbed all public interest in the questions 

 of transportation. 



With the period of the panic of '37 we need not concern 

 ourselves at this time. The fact of chief importance in this 

 connection is that this same period saw the advent of the 

 locomotive and the railway as a practical possibility in the 

 development of local and interstate communication, and the 

 scheme appealed to the judgment and swayed the desires of 

 eminent and ambitious men. Highways and canals came to 

 be looked upon as unworthy the consideration of the modern 

 time the dreams of an obsolete age. No more interstate 

 highways were planned, no more canal systems were pro- 

 posed, while those already constructed were allowed to suf- 

 fer from neglect. Of what use, argued the men of affairs 

 of the day, is the pike road and the towpath when for every 

 purpose, military, commercial and social, the railway is so 

 much better? And, truly, when the merchant and specu- 

 lator could be whirled with swiftness and comfort from city 

 to- city, and particularly when the lawmakers of the land could 

 for the same purpose draw mileage from the pockets of the peo- 

 ple, of what importance could the country roads possibly 

 be? They were certainly as good as they had ever been, 

 and why, within reason, should the farmer who got his pace 

 behind the plow desire to go faster? No one seemed to ap- 

 preciate the fact that the body politic is like the animal body 

 in this regard that a suffering member causes all the other 

 members to suffer with it ; that national prosperity and the 

 prosperity of each class depends upon the prosperity of all 

 classes alike. But the desire on the part of the people to 

 penetrate the wilderness of the interior gave rise to thou- 



