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England, and France, but of Kussia, China, Japan, and the remote islands 

 of the sea. In turn those now unimportant cities and states of Tyre and 

 Sidon, Genoa, Portugal, Spain and Holland, have through their commercial 

 superiority commanded the seas, and gathered untold ^millions of treasure. 



And to-day the history of the past,* epeating itself, shows that the 

 relative power and advancement of the leading nations of the earth is 

 jargely in proportion to their relative facilities for inter-communication and 

 exchanges. In the front rank of nations in this respect, now stands 

 England, holding a supremacy justly our own, and which would have beeti 

 but for our civil war, when piratical cruisers, let loose by her criminal policy, 

 swept our commerce from the ocean, and which through our unwise navi- 

 gation laws, is but slowly reviving. 



A glance back within the memory of many of us, shows a wonderful 

 advance made in our own country in facilities of travel and transportation ; 

 a greater advance than the world ever before witnessed in centuries of time. 

 Sixty or seventy years ago population and business centered along the sea 

 coast, or mainly followed our navigable water courses. In those days the 

 stage coach and the lumbering four-horse Pennsylvania wagon, were the 

 only means of interior travel, and movement of products. Then came the 

 Erie Canal, the grand opening of which some of us remember, quickly 

 populating central and western New York, and opening wide the gates to 

 the great West. Iti was then thought we had reached the goal of all 

 reasonable expectation. Canals were the mania of the day, so much so 

 that an eminent engineer pronounced rivers as mainly useful and designed 

 by Grod for feeders to canals. 



Then came our lake and river steam navigation with our national 

 roads. And while the march of emigration and development was wonderful, 

 yet still the long, tedious, and expensive mode of travel, requiring ten or 

 fifteen days to reach what is now the center of our population, rendered the 

 greater part of our own State valueless to the settler beyond securing the 

 simplest means of existence, and almost wholly shut out from the world, so 

 far as having any market for its surplus products. 



' Then came within the memory of many of us, in the order or provi- 

 dence, the greatest improvement of all, the railway, and cars moved by 

 steam equally over mountain and plain, across rivers and deserts, penetrating 

 the remotest sections, diffusing wealth, comfort, civilization and Christianity 

 with their untold blessings, through the land, and to a large extent super- 

 seding lake and river navigation, as they had superseded stage coaches and 

 canals, and combining all that seemed desirable in transportation, viz.- 



