The things we do!

No one asks--or few ask--if the wheel brings good or ill. The only concern
is that it shall run as quickly and safely as is humanly and mechanically
possible and shall not discriminate between one shipper and another, one
community and another, one consumer and another. That is the railroad
problem. The wheel has removed watersheds at pleasure, created cities and
fortunes by its presence or its taking thought. But under the new policy
of the government it is not likely that there will ever again be such
ruthless disturbance of nature, or such wild, profuse creation. Democracy,
beginning in that valley, is seeking now a perfect impersonal
transportation machine.
But such a machine will drain quite as effectively the country districts.
The census returns for 1910 show, for example, that in one prosperous
agricultural State, Missouri, just west of the Mississippi, while the
State as a whole showed an increase of 187,000 in ten years, there was a
net decrease of 84,000 in the rural districts.


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