One railroad recently planned for a Western extension, and laid out along its lines the sites of thirty-eight new towns, each of which was located and named before the question of inhabitants for the towns was ever taken up. Another railway in the Southwest has named fifty cities that are yet to build; and still others have scores of communities that in time are to be the battle-grounds of human lives, the stages of the human tragedy or comedy. The railways have not only reached but created provinces; they have not only nourished but conceived communities. Out of that cold upper land of the Northwest, which was thus fostered and nurtured into strength, there came, in one year, one hundred and ten million bushels of wheat to feed the world, and that in a year when the crop shortage was over one hundred million bushels. This is only a part of the output of that land, for the railway showed these farmers long ago that diversified farming was their hope and their salvation. Past one of those forts which in 1812 the United States erected to protect her fur traders and to keep out her covetous rivals, there came in the same year from the far Northwest, once home of the buffalo, the Indian, and the scout, twenty-five million two hundred fifty-five thousand eight hundred and ten tons of freight, nearly all of the long-haul sort, and hence to be taken as showing in part the product of the far Northwest itself. Three transcontinental roads, the Northern Pacific, the Union Pacific, and the Southern Pacific, in 1899 carried twenty million one hundred forty-six thousand four hundred and ten tons of freight, with a haul averaging about three hundred miles in length. Nearly a thousand millions of dollars is represented in the capitalization of these roads—far more than is demanded by the free roadway of the Great Lakes, the modern freight traffic of which is really a development subsequent to that of the railway exploitation of the West. This perhaps suggests a day when Chicago may come to be as closely connected with New Orleans as was the latter city with Kentucky in the day of Wilkinson.[57] It is impossible to study the industrial history of the West without studying also that of the South, for though the two sections are far apart and utterly unlike, they yet have the intercurrent soul of twins. No part of America is less known and more misunderstood than the South, and surely it must be one of the most cheering reflections to conclude that yearly the South comes closer to the North, and the North to the South. Statesmanship could not in a century so fully have accomplished this great and desirable result. The railroads are doing what statecraft could not do.