As for our own marches, Alaska is to repeat at least in part the story of California. The Yukon and White Pass Railway is but a hint, a beginning. It is now upon the question of a railway from Circle City in Alaska to the Bering Sea, to connect there with a railway which shall eventually tap both China and Siberia! It is entirely within possibility that we shall in time see a continuous railway transportation from the Atlantic to the far-off straits that separate this country from Asia. Scientists tell us that over these straits there perhaps came once the ancestors of the aboriginal population of this continent. This population we have destroyed. There will also be destroyed all those nomad tribes of northeastern Asia that seem not useful in this great scheme which we call civilization. Alaska was long thought uninviting; yet railroad building there is feasible, and Alaska is feasible as residence for man; and railroad man is concerned with every corner of this globe that can serve as residence for human beings. In the course of an address during the year 1901, a modern railway man[60] spoke in part as follows: “The twentieth century has been ushered into existence, and at its very dawn we find a struggle, not for the acquisition of new territory, not for the subjection of foreign countries, not a crusade to introduce a new and better religion, but a struggle between the great nations of the earth for supremacy in industrial pursuits and to supply the markets of the world. The nineteenth century has frequently been referred to as the Age of Transportation. Distribution is the handmaid of production. Bacon said: ‘There are three things that make a country great: fertile fields, busy workshops, easy conveyance for men and goods from place to place.’ The evolution that has taken place in the transportation of this country during the nineteenth century has been remarkable and unparalleled in the history of man. In the year 1800 it cost one hundred dollars to move a ton of wheat from Buffalo to New York. The regular rate is now a dollar and a half per ton, and it has been carried for a dollar. One hundred years ago we paid twenty-five cents per mile, traveling by stage-coach, without baggage; now we carry home-seekers from the East into California for approximately one-twentieth of the old rate.