To the north of the Harriman lines, J. J. Hill has his wonderful group of railroads, the Burlington, the Great Northern, and the Northern Pacific, together reaching from Chicago to the north Pacific coast. Still farther north Canada has her own transcontinental in the Canadian Pacific Railway, another approaching completion in the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. The "Grangers" (so called from their original purpose as grain carriers), that occupy the eastern end of this western territory,--the St. Paul, the Gould lines, the Northwestern and the Rock Island--are just now showing pertinent interest in reaching the Pacific, with its great Oriental trade in its infancy. The first two of these have already laid their rails over the great slopes of the Rocky Mountains and so it is that the building of railroads in the United States is nowhere near a closed book at the present time. The better to understand the causes that went to the making of these great systems, it may be well to go back into the past, to examine the eighty years that the railroad has been in the making. These busy years are illuminating. They tell with precise accuracy the development of American transportation. Yet, as we can devote to them only a few brief pages, our review of them must be cursory. When the Revolution was completed and the United States of America firmly established as a nation, the people began to give earnest attention to internal improvement and development. Under the control of a distant and unsympathetic nation there had been very little encouragement for development; but with an independent nation all was very different. The United States began vaguely to realize their vast inherent wealth. How to develop that wealth was the surpassing problem. It became evident from the first that it must depend almost wholly on transportation facilities. To appreciate the dimensions of this problem it must be understood that at the beginning of the last century a barrel of flour was worth five dollars at Baltimore. It cost four dollars to transport it to that seaport from Wheeling; so it follows, that flour must be sold at Wheeling at one dollar a barrel for the Baltimore market. With a better form of transportation it would cost a dollar a barrel to carry the flour from Wheeling to Baltimore, making the price of the commodity at the first of these points under transit facilities four dollars a barrel. It did not take much of that sort of reasoning to make the States appreciate from the very first that a great effort must be made toward development. That effort, having been made, brought its own reward.