ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN’S ASSOCIATION. 
57 
England, and France, but of Kussia, China, Japan, and the remote islands 
ot 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, repeating 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 been 
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 lork, and opening wide the gates to 
the great West. It 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 God 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.-' 
