At the present time, where the question of time is not important, the carriage of passengers and goods by water is so much cheaper than by rail as to survive in competition. Where the passenger’s time is of value, or perishable goods are carried, or the merchant is in a hurry to receive his consignment, the railway, following virtually the shortest distance between the two points--piercing mountains, spanning ravines and crossing the rivers, is, of course, the necessary means of communication. Most of the great cities that have sprung up within the memory of people still living, like those of old, are reared on the sea-coasts or the shores of great lakes, or on the banks of navigable streams, the facilities of transportation by water conspiring to create these centres of activity and industry. Where a number of railroad lines concentrate, a great city may spring up--like Indianapolis; or where great manufacturing facilities exist, as in the juxtaposition of the coal, ore and flux--as at Birmingham, Alabama. But these are comparatively few in number, and have not such limits of expansion as cities which may be reached by water. Aside from their commercial disadvantages, the inland cities present difficult problems, among the most important being that of successful sewage and sanitation. In this country, indeed, most of the earlier railroads were projected merely to connect navigable streams with one another, or with the coast, their founders evidently regarding rail transportation as an auxiliary of the natural ways, and not as a great rival which was in a very few years to dominate them. In other instances, railways in the early days were simply built along the banks of the rivers, because the people found that when the latter were frozen in the winter, they needed some other means of transportation. These scattered bits of road here and there were, in after years, as the possibilities of railroad development began to dawn upon the minds of far-seeing men, united by connecting links and reorganized into roads of much greater length. In fact some of the most difficult features of the railroad problem of the present day grew out of the failure of projectors of railroads in the early days to grasp the meaning of the system which they were instituting. France, Germany, Belgium and other European cities have had no serious railway problem. The English people, however, have passed through very nearly the same experience as ours, and we are now solving the same questions which puzzled their heads nearly a generation ago.