The first great service of the railroads to the republic, as such, was to make it possible that the people of a territory three thousand miles wide, crossed by two mountain ranges, should be bound into one republic. The waters to the east of the Alleghanies ran toward the Atlantic, the waters west of the Rockies ran toward the Pacific, and the waters between the mountains ran to the Gulf of Mexico. If the great east-and-west railroads had not been built and some of the waters of the Lakes had not been made to run down the Mohawk Valley into the Hudson it is more than probable that there would have been a secession of the men who called themselves the "men of the western waters," a secession of the west from the east, rather than of the south from the north. If the men of this valley had continued men of the "western waters" there would probably have been at least three republics in North America and perhaps as many as in South America. When Josiah Quincy, a famous son of Massachusetts, said for the men of the east in the halls of Congress, "You have no authority to throw the rights and liberties and property of this people into hotchpot with the wild men on the Missouri, nor with the mixed though more respectable race of Anglo- Hispano-Gallo-Americans, who bask on the sands in the mouth of the Mississippi," he was visualizing the men whose interests followed the rivers to another tide-water than that of Boston and New York harbors. The railroads made a real prophecy of his fear that these men of the western rivers would some day be "managing the concerns of a seaboard fifteen hundred miles from their residences, and having a preponderance in the councils," into which, as he contended, "they should never have been admitted." [Footnote: Speech on the bill to admit Orleans Territory into the Union. Annals of Congress, 11th Cong., 3d Sess., 1810-11, pp. 524- 542.] He was thinking and speaking rather of the southwest than of the northwest, but it was the east-and-west lines of railroad that prevented the vital interest of that northern valley from flowing with the water along parallels of longitude to where the gulf currents would catch its commerce, instead of over the mountains along the sterner parallels of latitude and in straighter course to Europe. The force of gravity, the temptation of the tropics, the indifference of the east, the freedom from eastern and puritanical restraints, were all on the side of a "republic of the western waters" and against that larger, continent-wide nationalism which now has its most ardent support in that valley through which the iron shuttles fly from sea to sea, weaving the waters as strands of color into a unified pattern of sublimer import.