LOCOMOTION AND TRANSPORT. 



1. THE art by which the products of labour and thought, and 

 the persons who labour and think, are transferred from place to 

 place, is, more than any other, essential to social advancement. 

 "Without it no other art can progress. A people who do not 

 possess it cannot be said to have emerged from barbarism. A 

 people who have not made some advances in it, cannot yet have 

 risen above a low state of civilisation. Nevertheless, this art has 

 been, of all others, the latest in attaining a state of perfection, so 

 late, indeed, that the future historian of social progress will 

 record, without any real violation of truth, that its creation is one 

 of the events which have most eminently signalised the present 

 age and generation. For, although transport by land and water 

 was practised by our forefathers, its condition was so immeasurably 

 below that to which it has been carried in our times, that a more 

 adequate idea of its actual state will be conveyed by calling it a 

 new art, than by describing it as an improvement on the old one. 



2. But if human invention has been late in directing its powers 

 to this object, it must be admitted to have nobly compensated for 

 the tardiness of its action by the incomparable rapidity of 

 advancement it has produced, when once they have been brought 

 into play. Within a hundred years, more has been accomplished 

 in facilitating and expediting intercommunication, than was effected 

 from the creation of the world to the middle of the last century. 

 This statement may, perhaps, appear strained and exaggerated, 

 but it will bear the test of examination. 



3. The geographical conditions of the world, the distribution of 

 the people who inhabit it, and the exclusive appropriation of its 

 natural productions destined for their use to the various countries 

 of which it consists, have imposed on mankind the necessity of 

 intercommunication and commerce. Commerce is nothing more 

 than the interchange of the productions of industry between people 

 and people. Such interchange presupposes the existence of the 

 art of transport by land and water. In proportion to the per- 

 fection of this art will be the extent of commerce. 



A people incapable of communicating with others must subsist 

 exclusively upon the productions of its own labour and its own 

 soil. But nature has given us desires after the productions of 

 other soils and other climates. Besides this, the productions of 

 each particular soil or country are obtainable in superfluity. 

 They are infinitely more in quantity than the people by whom 

 and amidst whom they are produced have need of; while other 

 and distant peoples are in a like situation, having a superfluity of 

 some products and an insufficiency or a total absence of others. 

 The people of South Carolina and Georgia have a superfluity of 

 cotton, the people of the West India Islands have a superfluity of 

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