It is little more than sixty years since the first steam road was constructed, yet at this time, within the limits of the United States alone, nearly 200,000 miles of railway are in active operation; and of this immense mileage—enough to put eight girdles around the globe—fifty per cent has been built in the last two decades and more than eighty per cent since the close of our civil war, only thirty-seven years ago. Elsewhere similar activity has prevailed during the same period, until animal power the world over has been almost wholly displaced for the purposes of transportation. Not only has the railroad become the chief agency by which inland commerce is carried on, but its influence upon all pursuits is so powerful, and its relation to every phase of activity so intimate and vital, that its effects upon social welfare and industrial progress present an inquiry of the gravest moment. No other triumph over the forces of nature compares with this in its influence upon human environment. It has directly and powerfully affected the direction and volume of commercial currents, the location and movements of population, the occupations and pursuits in which the masses of men are engaged, the division of labor, the conditions under which wealth is accumulated, the social and industrial habits of the world, all the surroundings and characteristics of the associated life of to-day. The world has seen no change so sudden and so amazing. The next fact to be noted is hardly less remarkable. Not only are the new methods of transportation incomparably superior in speed, cheapness and capacity, but, unlike those which have been superseded, these new methods are themselves capable of indefinite increase and expansion. The maximum efficiency of an animal is so well known as to amount to a constant quantity, and this unit of power is practically unchangeable. Substantially the same thing is true of a vessel of given dimensions and given spread of canvas. For this reason distribution remained, as I have said, the one fixed and inflexible element to which other activities, however elastic and progressive, were necessarily adjusted and by which they were limited.