seemed smaller and the Rockies less formidable. Men now looked
forward confidently, with an optimist of these days, to the time
"when circulation and association between the Atlantic and
Pacific and the Mexican Gulf shall be as free and perfect as they
are at this moment in England" between the extremities of that
country. The vision of a nation closely linked by wellworn paths
of commerce was daily becoming clearer. What further westward
progress was soon to be made remains to be seen.



CHAPTER IX. The Dawn Of The Iron Age

Despite the superiority of the new iron age that quickly followed
the widespreading canal movement, there was a generous spirit and
a chivalry in the "good old days" of the stagecoach, the
Conestoga, and the lazy canal boat, which did not to an equal
degree pervade the iron age of the railroad. When machinery takes
the place of human brawn and patience, there is an indefinable
eclipse of human interest. Somehow, cogs and levers and
differentials do not have the same appeal as fingers and eyes and
muscles. The old days of coach and canal boat had a
picturesqueness and a comradeship of their own. In the turmoil
and confusion and odd mixing of every kind of humanity along the
lines of travel in the days of the hurtling coach-and-six, a
friendliness, a robust sympathy, a ready interest in the
successful and the unfortunate, a knowledge of how the other half
lives, and a familiarity with men as well as with mere places,
was common to all who took the road. As Thackeray so vividly
describes it: