398 History of Inland Transport 



on the railway for the facilities it conferred on the country. 

 Without the railway a cheap and widely distributed news- 

 paper press, such as exists to-day, would have been impossible. 



So the tendency of the railway was not only to advance 

 trade, travel and transport, but to open men's minds, to 

 broaden the intellectual outlook of the artisan and the labourer, 

 to place them more on a level with their social superiors, and 

 to make them better fitted for the exercise of greater political 

 powers. 



Socially, too, the railway system constitutes a paramount 

 factor in the national life. 



Thanks to the greater facilities the railways afforded for 

 the distribution of commodities, and thanks, also, to the 

 greater division of labour following on the changed economic 

 conditions, there was no need in the Railway Age for house- 

 holders to practise the same domestic arts that had been more 

 or less obligatory in the case of their forefathers. There was 

 no longer the same necessity for each family to brew its own 

 ale, to bake its own bread and make its own cloth, or to 

 provide stores of salt beef and other supplies in the autumn 

 as if for a winter siege. When the railway enabled the village 

 shopkeeper to satisfy promptly all local requirements, in 

 winter as readily as in summer, the whole conditions of rural 

 life were changed. 



In towns, as in villages, the railways allowed not alone of a 

 better distribution of domestic necessaries but of distribution 

 at lower prices. The distance at which a commodity was 

 produced or from which it came had, as a rule, comparatively 

 little effect on the actual selling price. The large towns, 

 especially, had the entire country open to them as their sources 

 of supply, and were no longer limited to the produce and the 

 prices of, say, a fifteen or a twenty-mile radius. 



Following closely on the necessaries came the luxuries, the 

 cheapening of which, mainly owing to the lower cost of 

 transport, gave even to artisans' families alternative food 

 supplies of a kind beyond the reach even of the wealthiest 

 in the land a century ago. 



The greater consumption of fruit and vegetables, sold at the 

 lowest possible prices, must have been of incalculable 

 advantage to the health of the community ; though this 

 advantage would not have been possible but for the facilities 



