II.


"For miracles are ceased;
"And therefore we must needs admit the means
"How things are perfected."
--Henry V, Act I.


It was well understood by the Romans in their palmy days that a
great empire could not be held together without means of easy
communication between distant provinces, and their fine hard roads
ramifying from Rome to the remote corners of Gaul or Dacia, testify
to their wisdom and enterprise in this respect. When Great Britain
in the eighteenth century, full of inventive skill, reared men who
by means of improved roads, well-bred horses and fine vehicles
raised the rate of travel to ten miles an hour from end to end of
the kingdom, a great deal of complacent satisfaction was indulged
in over the advantages likely to result from such rapid travelling.
This great speed, however, was made to appear quite slow in the
first half of the nineteenth century when locomotives were invented
capable of covering sixty miles an hour. Nowadays the old cumbrous
locomotive, rumbling and puffing along and making only sixty miles
in sixty minutes, is a very dilatory machine in comparison with
our light and beautiful rocket cars, which frequently dart through
the air at the rate of sixty miles in one minute. The advantages
to a country like ours, over 3,000 miles wide, of swift transit
are obvious. The differences in sentiment, politically, nationally,