EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 255 
hundred years ago. The change has occurred close 
upon our own time. 
When the postal service was inaugurated between 
New York and Boston in 1673 by Governor Lovelace, 
it took a month to cover the distance on horseback, 
and people were fain to be content with letters and 
news a month old. Midway between that time and 
the present, in the days when a group of statesmen 
assembled at Philadelphia were framing our federal 
constitution, the distance between New York and 
Boston had been reduced from a month to a week, and 
a single stage-coach starting daily from each end of 
the route sufficed for all the passengers and all the 
freight between the two cities except such bulky freight 
as went bysea. Now the fact that we can go from New 
York to Paris or to Vancouver Island within the com- 
pass of a week brings with it many far-reaching conse- 
quences. Politically, it gives to a nation like our own, 
spread over three million square miles of territory, such 
advantages as were formerly confined to small states like 
the republics of ancient Greece, or of Italy and the 
Netherlands in the Middle Ages. It is perpetually 
bringing people into contact with new faces, new climes, 
new forms of speech, new habits of thought, thus mak- 
ing the human mind more flexible than of old, more hos- 
pitable toward new ideas, more friendly to strangers. 
But these are not the only effects. Not only have 
numerous petty manufactures, formerly carried on in 
separate households, given place to gigantic factories, 
but the organization of every form of industry has been 
profoundly modified by railways and telegraphs. It 
becomes easier in many instances to do things directly 
that would once have been done by proxy, or, if 
