Recently there was erected at Doylestown, Pennsylvania, a monument to a forgotten man, John Fitch, who in the year 1785 was known as one curious in experiments with steam as a motive power. Fitch built a steamboat, and had visions of many things in the way of steam locomotion. The life of this unknown man marks the extent of our backward vision in these matters; yet Fitch lived little more than a century ago. Indeed, the growth of the railroads of America has taken place in less than three-quarters of a century. And yet to-day we have more than two hundred thousand miles of railway, and as each day rolls by, we build from ten to twenty-five miles more. Railroading is a profession perfected in the hard evolution of American necessity. Our first railways were but attempts, guesses, desires, hopes, purely local propositions and not always well conceived as such. Yet they grew and multiplied, and presently, before we had time to think, they had multiplied over much. Then came the days of the railroad receiver. After the receiver there came the combiner. This man, in these bubble days of so-called prosperity, for a time undertakes to do what competition was not able to do. It is only for a time that any man or combination of men can escape the workings of the great natural law of competition. Neither monopolies nor trades-unions, neither the "trust" in capital nor the "trust" in labor can forever evade it. In time there will again be change; and meantime, ruin.
To-day there are five great centralizations or combinations of capital that control the railway situation in America. In these swift times of change these arrangements may not long remain permanent, and it is bootless to mention them specifically. The building of these thousands of miles of railway and the assembling of them together under industrial truce has been the product of a giant game in commerce, a commerce not to be confined wholly by the limits of this continent. The great ships built for the Orient are now an old story, an accepted enterprise that spells Europe on the one hand and Asia on the other.
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.