Nothing save a loose,
heterogeneous confederation could have been practicable without its
unifying service. It is only fair to those who made such gloomy prophecies
in the early days to say that they had no intimation of what steam was
destined to do. When Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat, early
in the nineteenth century, on a journey back from the west in a stage-
coach, said that some day steam would drive wagons faster than they were
going in the coach, his fellow passengers thought him a dreamer--a
visionary. But it was only a man of such dreams or visions who in those
days could have seen the possibility which has to-day been realized
through the railroad.
I have spoken of the part which the steam wheel has had in the rapid
development and the exploitation of that great valley which, except for
its pioneering in wild places, might have been seven hundred years, as
Andrew Johnson predicted, in filling up, or at least two or three
centuries.
I have intimated its influence in promoting migration cityward--a movement
as wide as European civilization--but intensified there, where the
inhabitants have not been tied through generations of inheritance or
historic associations to particular fields, where primogeniture has no
observance, and where the traditions are of the wilderness and the visions
are ever of a promised land beyond.
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