BIBLIOGRAPHY



THE RAILROAD BUILDERS

CHAPTER I. A CENTURY OF RAILROAD BUILDING

The United States as we know it today is largely the result of
mechanical inventions, and in particular of agricultural
machinery and the railroad. One transformed millions of acres of
uncultivated land into fertile farms, while the other furnished
the transportation which carried the crops to distant markets.
Before these inventions appeared, it is true, Americans had
crossed the Alleghanies, reached the Mississippi Valley, and had
even penetrated to the Pacific coast; thus in a thousand years or
so the United States might conceivably have become a
far-reaching, straggling, loosely jointed Roman Empire, depending
entirely upon its oceans, internal watercourses, and imperial
highways for such economic and political integrity as it might
achieve. But the great miracle of the nineteenth century--the
building of a new nation, reaching more than three thousand miles
from sea to sea, giving sustenance to more than one hundred
million free people, and diffusing among them the necessities and
comforts of civilization to a greater extent than the world had
ever known before is explained by the development of harvesting
machinery and of the railroad.

The railroad is sprung from the application of two fundamental
ideas--one the use of a mechanical means of developing speed, the