“We are so involved in the events and movements of society that we do not stop to realize—what is undeniably true—that during the last forty years all modern societies have entered upon a period of change, more marked, more pervading, more radical than any that has occurred during the last three hundred years. In saying this, I do not forget our own political and military history, nor the French Revolution of 1793. The changes now taking place have been wrought, and are being wrought, mainly, almost wholly, by a single mechanical contrivance, the steam locomotive. There are many persons now living who well remember the day when Andrew Jackson, after four weeks of toilsome travel from his home in Tennessee, reached Washington and took his first oath of office as President of the United States. On that day, the railway locomotive did not exist. During that year, Henry Clay was struggling to make his name immortal by linking it with the then vast project of building a national road—a turnpike—from the national capital to the banks of the Mississippi. “In the autumn of that very year George Stephenson ran his first experimental locomotive, the ‘Rocket,’ from Manchester to Liverpool and back. The rumble of its wheels, redoubled a million times, is echoing to-day on every continent. “In 1870, there were about 125,000 miles of railroad on the two hemispheres, constructed at a cost of little less than $100,000 per mile, and representing nearly $12,000,000,000 of invested capital. “A parliamentary commission found that during the year 1866 the railway cars of Great Britain carried an average of 850,000 passengers per day; and during that year the work done by their 8,125 locomotives would have required for its performance three and a half million horses and nearly two million men. “What have our people done for the locomotive, and what has it done for us? To the United States, with its vast territorial area, the railroad was a vital necessity. “Talleyrand once said to the first Napoleon that ‘the United States was a giant without bones.’ Since that time our gristle has been rapidly hardening. Sixty-seven thousand miles of iron track is a tolerable skeleton, even for a giant. When this new power appeared, our people everywhere felt the necessity of setting it to work; and individuals, cities, States, and the nation lavished their resources without stint to make a pathway for it. Fortunes were sunk under almost every mile of our earlier roads in the effort to capture and utilize this new power. If the State did not head the subscription for a new road, it usually came to the rescue before the work was completed.