The American people have done much for the locomotive, and it has done much for them. We have already seen that it has greatly reduced, if not wholly destroyed, the danger that the government will fall to pieces by its own weight. The railroad has not only brought our people and their industries together, but it has carried civilization into the wilderness, has built up States and Territories, which, but for its power, would have remained deserts for a century to come. "Abroad and at home," as Mr. Adams tersely declares, "it has equally nationalized people and cosmopolized nations." It has played a most important part in the recent movement for the unification and preservation of nations. It enabled us to do what the old military science had pronounced impossible--to conquer a revolted population of eleven millions, occupying a territory one-fifth as large as the continent of Europe. In an able essay on the railway system, Mr. Charles F. Adams, Jr. has pointed out some of the remarkable achievements of the railroad in our recent history. For example, a single railroad track enabled Sherman to maintain eighty thousand fighting men three hundred miles beyond his base of supplies. Another line, in a space of seven days, brought a re-enforcement of two fully equipped army corps around a circuit of thirteen hundred miles, to strengthen an army at a threatened point. He calls attention to the still more striking fact that for ten years past, with fifteen hundred millions of our indebtedness abroad, an enormous debt at home, unparalleled public expenditures, and a depreciated paper currency, in defiance of all past experience, we have been steadily conquering our difficulties, have escaped the predicted collapse, and are promptly meeting our engagements; because, through energetic railroad development, the country has been producing real wealth, as no country has produced it before. Finally, he sums up the case by declaring that the locomotive has "dragged the country through its difficulties in spite of itself." * * * * * In the darkness and chaos of that period, the feudal system was the first important step toward the organization of modern nations. Powerful chiefs and barons intrenched themselves in castles, and, in return for submission and service, gave to their vassals rude protection and ruder laws. But as the feudal chiefs grew in power and wealth, they became the oppressors of their people, taxed and robbed them at will, and finally, in their arrogance, defied the kings and emperors of the Mediæval States. From their castles, planted on the great thoroughfares, they practised the most capricious extortions on commerce and travel, and thus gave to modern language the phrase, "levy blackmail."