The Cosmopolitan Railway Author:William Gilpin Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI THE RAILWAY AS A FACTOR OF PROGRESS To the very existence of civilized communities the railroad has become almost as much a necessity as is the ... more »circulation of the blood to the individual. Not only do we depend upon it for the means of locomotion, but for almost everything that we eat or drink or wear. And in no country in the world do people rely so much on their railroads as in the United States, where in the more thinly populated sections coal for fuel and lumber for building are often con veyed by rail hundreds of miles from the place of production. But perhaps their greatest benefit has been in the opening up for settlement of vast and fertile regions, before unpeopled except by savages and wild beasts. It is not indeed too much to say, that but for the advent of the railway, the population of this republic, instead of being spread over its entire surface, would still have been mainly confined to its thirteen original states, and with but a small percentage of that which now exists on the Pacific slope. Nowhere has the railway wrought such marvellous results as in Colorado and on to the Pacific, converting, as at the touch of a magic wand, what was before little else than a desert, or at best a pasture-ground, into a region abounding with grain and fruit, with all the choicest products of the farm, the orchard, and the vineyard, and giving especially to Colorado and California a commercial and industrial development such as has never before been witnessed in the lifetime of a single generation. Said General Sherman in one of his reports to the secretary of war: "No person who has not been acrossthe continent can possibly comprehend the change now in progress there. Nearly two thirds of the domain of the United States lies west of the Mississippi, and at ...« less