The great state of California alone was cause and sufficient reason for the swift development of the remoter American West. There can not be denied the tremendous effect produced by the sudden growth of California, coming as it did hard on the time of the annexation of Texas and the widening of our national territory in the far Southwest. As to the discovery of gold and the swift growth of California being unmixed benefits, there may exist at this later day something of a sober doubt. California marked the beginning of the feverish, insane, excitable type of American, who wishes to do everything at once—and does it! Without California and the Civil War we should to-day still be settling the West. With California we are settling the islands of the Orient. The high-geared life of to-day is part of the corollary of washing a year’s income out of the ground in an hour’s work, of crossing the continent in a week instead of a season, of tearing down mountains by machinery instead of building up homesteads deliberately. Stimulation and destruction do not go so far apart. California gave to the world the spectacle of a nation drunk with energy, using with maddened zeal for a time powers made three-fold, employing an imagination under whose concept naught under Heaven seemed impossible—or was impossible! This was revolution. There was a demand for revolution of an even pace in all lines of allied industry. It was time for the railroad, and the railroad must now perforce come swiftly. We built better steamships to get out into our new, feverish, golden West. We used the old trails, but they would no longer serve. We employed the old mountain passes, the old grazing and watering places, but neither would these serve. No time now for hoof or wheel, or for the way of the ship upon the sea! No time now for the wayside ranches along the Platte, for the old posts of Laramie and Bridger and Hall! The golden country clamored all too strongly. Therefore, with a leap, the old trails straightened out and shortened. New passes over the Great Divide were found. The long thin line of rails connected the East with a West now swiftly grown mightier than itself. All American morals and manners underwent swift reconstruction. The United States, plus California, plus the Western railways, became a different nation. It is not necessary to take up in detail the chronological or geographical study of the building of the transcontinental railways. They have done their work. The commercial history of America is sufficiently well written to-day on the face of every country of the globe. We have built our own railroads, and to-day we build and sell railroads and equipment for the Himalayas and the Sudan. We shall build the railroads that will make Africa another America. We shall build the railroads that will at length bring the Anglo-Saxon face to face with the Slav, in that struggle that shall pit the American West against the Russian East.