The effect of the railroad in thus multiplying and exchanging not only material products, but distributing the news of the day and bringing the inhabitants of the Pacific slope and those of the Atlantic seaboard into daily intellectual intercourse, and thus welding all into one homogeneous people, is a theme which has yet to be fully dealt with by the pen of the historian. From Maine to Texas, go where you will, you find the people read the same news, discuss the same questions, and are subjected to the same vivifying influences, the ideas of the farmer on the borders broadening in even pace with those of the dwellers in the cities until such a thing as provincialism is unknown on this continent. Indeed, foreigners who visit our shores, who have a taste for the picturesque, complain of this monotony, and bewail the fact that the American town or hamlet, whether situated on the borders of the great northern lakes or on the torrid shores of the Gulf, presents essentially the same exterior aspect and identical social conditions.
It would be too much to expect that this great railway system, with its unprecedented army of employés and the revenues of an empire, should be an unadulterated blessing; that it should not carry some alloy in its composition. Like most humane institutions, even the most beneficent, it has wrought mischiefs as well as brought great benefits. Until now the needs of our rapidly developing country were such that communities everywhere were clamoring for roads which would bring to them what they needed from the outside world and place within reach markets for their own products. Consequently, every possible inducement was offered for the building of railway lines, and without surrounding their construction with such safeguards as had already been found necessary in old and thickly populated countries. The result has been in many parts of the country an over-building of lines which has entailed subsequent losses and difficulties and the creation of abuses and complications which together constitute what has come to be known as “the railway problem.” It is clear that what might be broadly called the constructive period in our railway system is ended, and that we have now fairly entered upon a period of restriction and regulation. The people have now to learn to subdue and control these great Frankensteins of their own creation.