TRANSPORTATION 649 



one's morning paper is sufficient to indicate what these 

 agencies are doing to annihilate isolation. There one 

 may find what the Premier of England said but a few 

 minutes before, the price of stocks on the Paris or Berlin 

 stock exchanges, the progress of an expedition attempt- 

 ing to climb Mt. Everest, as well as the multifarious 

 doings of his own countrymen. All this is possible be- 

 cause news may be flashed over the world, at almost the 

 speed of light, by cable or radio. With rural mail de- 

 livery, parcels post, and telephones, the farmer is not only 

 likely to be as well informed as his city brothers but often 

 better. So efficient, in fact, are the means of disseminat- 

 ing news that the question now is not one of more news 

 but of sifting it and choosing only that worth knowing. 

 Transportation. — We have the greatest difficulty in 

 appreciating the physical isolation and consequent utter 

 provincialism of our ancestors of half-a-dozen generations 

 ago. Whole families lived out their lives without ever 

 wandering so much as ten miles from home. To the 

 majority of people the adjoining shire was as unknown 

 and foreign a region as are the ends of the earth to us 

 to-day. The difficulties and hazards of transportation 

 operated as effective deterrents to all but the adventurous 

 or those driven by necessity. Contrast with this the 

 present time in which a large percentage of the popula- 

 tion is able to travel about. Mechanical transport has 

 improved and cheapened the means of getting from place 

 to place until scarcely any adult member of a civilized 

 community but has some first-hand experience of dis- 

 tricts other than his own. To the free motion of persons 

 must be added the tremendous volume attained in the 

 transportation of goods. Thus one may to-day not only 

 go to the ends of the earth, on occasion, but he is daily in 

 contact with articles brought from its four corners. Any- 

 one who reads this will have about his person a dozen 

 things from remote parts of the world : shoes from Argen- 

 tine hides; coat of Australian wool, with buttons of 



