It was well understood by the Romans in their palmy days that a great empire could not be held together without means of easy communication between distant provinces, and their fine hard roads ramifying from Rome to the remote corners of Gaul or Dacia, testify to their wisdom and enterprise in this respect. When Great Britain in the eighteenth century, full of inventive skill, reared men who by means of improved roads, well-bred horses and fine vehicles raised the rate of travel to ten miles an hour from end to end of the kingdom, a great deal of complacent satisfaction was indulged in over the advantages likely to result from such rapid travelling. This great speed, however, was made to appear quite slow in the first half of the nineteenth century when locomotives were invented capable of covering sixty miles an hour. Nowadays the old cumbrous locomotive, rumbling and puffing along and making only sixty miles in sixty minutes, is a very dilatory machine in comparison with our light and beautiful rocket cars, which frequently dart through the air at the rate of sixty miles in one minute. The advantages to a country like ours, over 3,000 miles wide, of swift transit are obvious. The differences in sentiment, politically, nationally, and morally, which arose aforetime when people under the same government lived 3,000 miles apart have disappeared to be replaced by a powerful unanimity that renders possible great social movements, utterly impossible in the railway age, when seven days were consumed in journeying from east to west. The old idea that balloons would be used in this century for travelling has proved a delusion, almost their only use now being a meteorological one.