One is amazed, on looking up the facts, to learn how brief is the time in which this marvelous revolution has been wrought, and how vast is the business conducted on the iron net which now checkers almost the entire surface of the civilized world. Thousands of men are still living who read the contemporary accounts of Stephenson’s first successful experiment. His queer old locomotive, the _Rocket_, made its trial trip in September, 1829, not quite fifty-seven years ago, and the first successful railroad, that from Liverpool to Manchester, England, was formally opened on the 15th of September, 1830. Contemporaneous experiments were made in this country, however, and on the 30th of August, 1830, a trial was made of a locomotive built by the late Peter Cooper, of New York, on a road from Baltimore to Ellicott’s Mills. Mr. Cooper’s locomotive, however, was a diminutive machine of only one-horse power, and on the return trip to Baltimore it was beaten in speed by a pair of horses. Exactly four months after the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester road, or on the 15th day of January, 1831, a railroad running out of Charleston, South Carolina, was formally opened, the motive power being a small locomotive built at West Point, New York; and on the 9th of August of the same year a trial trip was made on a road from Albany to Schenectady, New York. These, however, were all mere experiments, and they were not attended with remarkable success. The locomotives used were small machines, difficult to regulate, feeble in power, and dangerous to those in charge of them. The first really successful railroad in this country was not opened until the 16th of May, 1834, and it ran from Boston to Newton, Massachusetts, a distance of about eight miles. Our railway system is, therefore, the growth of only a little more than fifty years. Thousands of living men have witnessed its beginning and its development to its present vast proportions. And what a marvel it is! There are now within the limits of the United States fully 160,000 miles of railway track, or enough to reach around the globe nearly seven times. Fully 30,000 locomotives drag the commerce of the continent over these lines, and 20,000 passenger cars and fully 900,000 freight cars are employed in transporting the travelers and merchandise of the country. In 1884—correct statistics of later date not having been compiled—the freight trains of the United States ran an aggregate of 334,814,529 miles, and the passenger trains an aggregate of 206,516,118 miles. During that year the railways carried 334,570,766 passengers and 390,074,749 tons of freight. In conducting this vast business—the magnitude of which the human mind can hardly measure or comprehend—250,456 persons were employed.