328 
POLITICAL INHERENCY OF GEOLOGY 
ious scheme as readily as many another of this class in our day 
becomes connected with unholy commercial enterprises to the 
great detriment of the public. Our earlier scientists could hardly 
suspect that they were being made the basis of an unmatched gam¬ 
ble in which stake was the life of the greatest nation of all history. 
The railroad setting of the national political conventions just 
before the out-break of the Civil War was little noted at the 
time. Yet it was the most potent single factor of that day. As 
the tie that bound together the circle from which its central voice 
uttered the sentiments of the platform of 1860 this railroad grasp 
was the basic influence which soon precipitated armed conflict 
within the nation. One phase, the most important of all it proved, 
was the possibility of the early spanning of the continent by bands 
of steel. The Union Pacific railroad project was then already 
crystallizing as a private enterprise so as to be soon pushed rapidly 
forward towards the Golden Gate. Its completion would immed¬ 
iately open to settlement no less than a dozen new territories, 
which would soon grow into large and lusty states. This single 
act would place the South hopelessly in the minority in political 
influence. Heretofore new states were admitted to the Union 
in pairs — one north and one south. A balance was always nicely 
maintained. Now, with the early completion of a northern rail¬ 
road in sight, that balance would be rudely disturbed; and the 
South could never expect to retain or regain its place in the sun. 
War with Mexico left to us that questionable legacy of a vast 
tract of new territory which, while it rounded out our national 
expansion quite to the Pacific Ocean, gave birth to new internal 
contentions, and new rivalries between the North and the South. 
The Republic’s demesne now crossed the continent. On either side 
of the continental expanse the sea-coasts were well settled; but 
the illimitable interior was yet given over to the savagery of 
nature. Genuine and urgent need thus arose for easy and speedy 
communication between the two widely seperated civilizations. 
This need Congress, in the fifties of the last century, took steps to 
accomplish in the form of providing for the surveying of practi¬ 
cal lines for railway building from the Mississippi River to the 
Pacific Ocean. 
During the decade preceding the outbreak of the Civil War no 
