Wasdn 
 HE 152 
 W17i 
 
HE is-iL 
 
 3tl)aca, S^cni Sark 
 
 CHARLES WILLIAM WASON 
 COLLECTION 
 
 CHINA AND THE CHINESE 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 CHARLES WILLIAM WASON 
 
 CLASS OF 1876 
 
 i9ie 
 

 Date Due 
 
 2SD 690 
 
The original of tliis bool< is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924023280690 
 
THE MEASURE OE CIVILIZATION 
 
 BY 
 GUY MORRISON WALKER 
 
 Author of: "Railroads and Wages," 
 "Trust Companies," "What Shall 
 We Buy?" "Railroad Rates and 
 Rebates," Etc. 
 
 .-^•^ .y 
 
 Civilization is that state or condition \^' }■' 
 
 in which any people or society exists . N^ - , - 
 
 It is measured by the degree to which 
 man has surmounted his natural limi- 
 tations in time and space, and ex- 
 presses itself not in terms of philo- 
 sophic thought but in standards of 
 living. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 191 7 
 

 Copyright 
 
 GUY M. WALKER 
 
 1917 
 
FOREWORD. 
 
 In 1873 my father was appointed a Mis- 
 sionary to China. I remember the trip vividly. 
 Stopping in Chicago we climbed the black in- 
 terior of the waterworks tower for a view from 
 the top. I recall the changing of cars at 
 Omaha. The stopping of our train to permit 
 a great herd of bison, that looked like a black 
 cloud on the plain ahead, to cross the track; the 
 narrow gauge branch at Ogden; the ferry from 
 Oakland to San Francisco. 
 
 We crossed the Pacific in an old side-wheel 
 paddle boat called "The China," and it took us 
 twenty-two days to reach Yokohoma. The 
 steamer from Yokohoma to Shanghai, and 
 from Shanghai to Tientsin was only six or 
 seven hundred tons burden, and in a storm 
 while rounding the Shantung Peninsula, my 
 mother was sure that we were lost. 
 
 The years of my youth were spent in travel- 
 ling about North China on donkey back, in 
 two wheel carts, in sedan chairs, or mule litters, 
 with occasional trips on the rivers and canals in 
 house boats, poled or towed by men. 
 
 The wages of the natives and the cost of liv- 
 ing were so low as to be unbelievable. A 
 
 III 
 
single cash, worth one-fifth of a cent, would 
 bring us joy for a day, and we used to boast 
 that we could live well on our favorite Chinese 
 foods at a cost of two cents a day. But in spite 
 of this, the expense of travel was enormous, 
 and days were necessary to prepare for even 
 the shortest journeys. Carts, mules and driv- 
 ers had to be engaged, supplies laid in, bed- 
 ding packed in rolls, and not the least of our 
 baggage was the heavy strings of copper cash 
 and the blocks of silver bullion necessary to pay 
 the expenses of the trip. 
 
 After nearly ten years of life under these 
 conditions, I came back to America to college. 
 It took us only fifteen days from Yokohoma to 
 San Francisco. The time from San Francisco 
 to Chicago had been shortened a day, and be- 
 tween noon and sunset we covered more miles 
 than could have been done by a week of solid 
 travel in China. 
 
 The contrast between methods of travel and 
 the standards of living held a question mark 
 constantly before my mind. After my gradua- 
 tion, I began travelling again. I could not see 
 much difference in the mentality or moral sense 
 of the different people, and the conviction grew 
 on me that the difference between the Civiliza- 
 
 IV 
 
tions in which I had lived was chiefly in the 
 methods of transportation and that there was 
 an inseparable connection between the cost of 
 transportation in any given country and the 
 standards of living that there prevailed. 
 
 In 1902 I wrote my monograph, entitled: 
 "Railroads and Wages," which brought me a 
 letter from Doctor Richard Ely of Wisconsin 
 University to the effect that I had discovered a 
 new principle in Political Economy, but it was 
 not until the Winter of 1911 that the following 
 lectures were written for delivery at Cornell 
 University, Ithaca, New York, in March, 1912. 
 They have since been repeated at DePauw 
 University, University of Pennsylvania and 
 Allegheny College. The pressvu-e of business 
 has made it impossible for me to respond to 
 further requests for their delivery and they are 
 now being printed in response to the many re- 
 quests that have been made for printed copies. 
 
 The form of the material is due to its prepa- 
 ration for delivery as lectures, and although I 
 feel that my proposition — ^that Civilization is 
 measm-ed in terms of transportation or by the 
 degree to which man has surmounted the limi- 
 tations of nature in time and space — ^is fully 
 developed and sufficiently supported by facts 
 
and reason, still I do not pretend that the mat- 
 ter here printed attains to the dignity of a 
 book. 
 
 I have always had a theory about books to 
 the effect that if you wanted to bury an idea 
 the best way was to put it in a book. In these 
 days most men are too busy to wade through 
 five hundred pages and up to this time when I 
 have felt that I had any idea to communicate, 
 I have compressed it within the pages of a 
 pamphlet that might be read in half an hoxnr. 
 
 The following lectures were prepared to 
 consume two hours in delivery, and they can 
 doubtless be read in less time. I feel that those 
 who take this time to read them will not find it 
 entirely wasted, and believe that if our people 
 can be brought to realize the real place that 
 our great railroad systems occupy in our every- 
 day lives, it will bring about a change in the 
 public attitude toward the regulation of rail- 
 roads and the other means of transportation 
 and communication. I hope that some, getting 
 herein a glimpse of the true relationship, will 
 give the subject that further investigation and 
 exposition that it deserves. 
 
 GUY MORRISON WALKER. 
 
 61 Broadway, New York. 
 
 VI 
 
THE MEASURE OF CIVILIZATION. 
 
 Lack of Mental Horizon and Histoeical 
 Peespective. 
 
 I remember once, on a trip with my father 
 in North China, the sun setting and we not 
 yet in sight of the village where we expected 
 to spend the night, stopping our cart by the 
 roadside to inquire of an old farmer how far 
 it was to the village which was supposed to lie 
 beyond the low hill two or three miles in front 
 of us. The old man said that he did not know. 
 Father expressed surprise, and said that he 
 had been informed that it was only ten or 
 twelve li, and that surely he, living so nearby, 
 could give us some idea as to whether it was 
 more or less ; but the old man drew himself up 
 with dignity, and replied, "Why should I 
 know? I have never been there," and pointing 
 to the ground beneath his feet, said: "I live 
 here." 
 
 To that old Chinese farmer, that village, only 
 three and a half miles away, simply did not 
 exist because it was the other side of the hill, 
 to whose summit he had never been, and be- 
 yond which he had never seen, because he 
 "lived here." 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 If you never get outside of your home vil- 
 lage or your home state, your world is that 
 village or that state, and heyond it you know 
 little or nothing. Your world, like that of the 
 old Chinese farmer, is as much as you can see 
 — like his, it is "all here." 
 
 If you have never looked through a micro- 
 scope, all that it reveals simply does not exist 
 for you. If you have never looked through a 
 telescope, all that such a vision reveals is be- 
 yond your ken. The same thing is true in the 
 world of thought. What you are unable to 
 think or understand, whether it is spiritual or 
 philosophic thought, economics or social rela- 
 tions, simply does not exist for you. 
 
 Thomas A. Edison was asked a few days 
 ago by one of our leading New York editors, 
 what he thought of the American system of 
 education. He replied "There isn't any." 
 Our college courses have been based on the 
 theory that no one seeks an education except 
 for the purpose of becoming a teacher. A col- 
 lege professor, who has himself received an 
 education based purely on giving him a lim- 
 ited ability to teach a given subject, proceeds 
 to lay out the courses for his students, ac- 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 cording to what he knows and he looks with 
 considerable disfavor on the student who tries 
 to carry more work or who asks for courses 
 beyond those prescribed. 
 
 The professor of Greek knows no sociology 
 because he teaches Greek; the professor of 
 Latin knows no economics because he teaches 
 Latin; the professor of English knows noth- 
 ing because he teaches !Enghsh. At least one 
 prominent political economist whose book I 
 have looked over knows nothing of the Egyp- 
 tians or the Greeks and has only a second- 
 hand, or hearsay knowledge of the fact that 
 there were Romans, All of them, like the 
 old Chinese farmer, draw themselves up with 
 dignity and say: "Why should I? I LIVE 
 HERE." 
 
 Superintendent Maxwell, of our New York 
 public schools, recently declared that "the bei^t 
 way to teach English was to study geometry." 
 And Bacon insisted that: "A law should be 
 passed prohibiting anyone from writing a line 
 until he was past twenty-five years," adding, 
 "it is seldom that one of that age has yet 
 learned how to think." 
 
 The weakness of American education was 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 recognized by De Toqueville. In his work on 
 "America," he declared that "In a democracy, 
 knowledge is sought not for its own sake, but 
 for its utility, and scientific studies are fol- 
 lowed for their practical advantages, while only 
 a languid interest is taken in the theoretical 
 side." The same idea was stated to me in an- 
 other way recently by a young engineer, who, 
 having graduated from a Pennsylvania col- 
 lege, had come to Columbia to stu^ engineer- 
 ing. Speaking of his fellow-students in the 
 engineering school, he said: "They are good 
 engineers, they know their rules and formulas, 
 but many of them never heard of WiUiam the 
 Conqueror." It is this lack of perspective 
 which, more than anything else, is affecting 
 American education. 
 
 My purpose in these lectures is to give you, 
 if possible, this perspective. I shall try to fix 
 a new point in your mental horizon; to give 
 you a landmark so far beyond the range of 
 your previous mental vision in that direction, 
 that when your attention is called to other 
 subjects your vision there will also be carried 
 beyond any point that you have seen before. 
 
 Education, for the sake of education, can 
 
 10 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 never be made particularly attractive to a stu- 
 dent; for, if pursued, the result at the best 
 is a mere pedant. 
 
 But education, for the piu-pose of life, if 
 you can get a glimpse of what life means, must 
 grip your interest and induce at once an 
 earnestness now lacking. 
 
 In his "Critique on Democracy," De Toque- 
 viUe complains that the exclusive attention de- 
 voted to practical results in democracies causes 
 the fundamental principles of civilization to be 
 lost sight of; and he mentions particularly the 
 Chinese, who, though enjoying at an early 
 period all the blessings of an advanced civili- 
 zation, yet became fossilized because they for- 
 got the principles upon which their civilization 
 originally rested. This warning is peculiarly 
 applicable to us today, for our civilization has 
 reached a stage of complexity that baffles the 
 ordinary mind. People, immersed in the hurry 
 and haste of modem hfe, have no time to study 
 the great laws that operate in and regulate 
 the social, political and industrial world. Each 
 intent on his own peculiar problems, fails to 
 perceive, much less to comprehend, the sophis- 
 try of the revolutionary schemes every day 
 
 II 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 proposed. The fundamental principles upon 
 which our political and economic structures 
 stand are forgotten. The structure itself is 
 attacked, and its demolition demanded merely 
 because it has stood so long and is, in the 
 popular mind, consequently old and out of 
 date. 
 
 A hundred years ago there was not a mile 
 of railroad in the world, nor a dollar invested 
 in them. Today there are over 600,000 miles 
 of railroad in the world, half of which are with- 
 in the confines of our own country; and they 
 represent an investment equal to one-tenth of 
 aU the values on this earth. Railroading is the 
 greatest business in the world. It is natural, 
 therefore, that when railroads occupy such a 
 large place in our national life, that they should 
 come under the attack of the unthinking. 
 
 I wish, therefore, to call your attention to 
 the part played by transportation in civiliza- 
 tion. The picture I shall draw must of ne- 
 cessity be broad, impressionistic and lacking in 
 many details, but if I am successful in the ef- 
 fort that I shall make, you will have plenty of 
 opportunity to fill out the picture and to sup- 
 ply the missing details during the rest of your 
 lives. 
 
 12 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 What Is Civilization? 
 
 We are so in the habit of identifying civili- 
 zation with our own civilization that few rec- 
 ognize not only that there have been, but are, 
 other civilizations. We fall into the same habit 
 as the Greeks, and unconsciously regard our- 
 selves as the civilized, and think of the rest of 
 the world as barbarians, 
 
 Guizot, in his "History of Civilization," 
 takes several pages in which to teU us what 
 civilization is not, and then concludes that the 
 chief idea contained in the word "CIVILIZA- 
 TION" is "that of a people in the course of 
 improvement and amelioration." 
 
 Buckle, in his "History of Civilization," 
 gives up the task of defining the word "CIVI- 
 LIZATION," and contents himself by de- 
 scribing as many as possible of the attributes 
 of civilization. 
 
 But, to my mind, the term CIVILIZA- 
 TION applies to the state or condition in which 
 any people or society exists. The Stone Age 
 had a civilization of its own, such as it was; 
 and the Bronze Age had its civilization; there 
 was a civilization of Egypt, of Babylonia, 
 of Phoenicia, of Judaism, of Greece, of Rome {. 
 
 13 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 and even now we have Christian civihzation, 
 Mohammedan civilization, Indian civilization 
 and Chinese civilization. 
 
 Primitive Man and His Peoblem 
 Go back to the beginning of the race and 
 you will find from the earliest traces of man- 
 kind on earth, that the race had already become 
 widely distributed. Wherever man was bom, 
 he was limited by the obstacles with which Na- 
 ture surrounded him, A mountain range on 
 one side was a barrier to his hunting in that 
 direction. The river that flowed out of the 
 mountains stopped his search for food in that 
 direction, and the impenetrable forest reach- 
 ing back from the river handicapped his hunt- 
 ing there. 
 
 But wherever these traces of mankind have 
 been found, whether under the tropics of In- 
 dia and Africa, or in the caves of Germany 
 and Scandinavia, whether the cliff-dwellers of 
 Mexico and the Andes, or the lake-dwellers of 
 Switzerland and Ceylon, there we find the 
 traces of man's contest with Nature. 
 
 Hemmed in by the mountains, the rivers 
 and the forest, man first wandered up and 
 
 14 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 down along the banks of the rivers, because 
 it was the easiest way to get from one known 
 place to another without being lost; and so it 
 is natural that the earliest remains of mankind 
 are always found along the beds or com-ses of 
 rivers. 
 
 These earliest remains are usually the gar- 
 bage heaps left by the primitive camps of 
 primitive man; and from these garbage heaps 
 we learn upon what the early race lived and 
 how they secured that living. The remains of 
 animals and fish are mixed with the stone axes 
 with which they killed, or the bone hooks with 
 which they fished. 
 
 There is no question but that primitive man 
 was at first a mere hunter and fisherman. He 
 had not, at this time, learned to tame any ani- 
 mal; he was even without a dog as his com- 
 panion. Little more than an animal himself, 
 he preyed upon other animals, while they, if 
 they could, preyed upon him. 
 
 The first knowledge practically that came to 
 savage man was the fear of the dark, for with 
 the falling of night, the beasts that preyed 
 on him came out to harrass him. He wor- 
 shipped the sun, because it gave him light and 
 
 16 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 brought him safety. He worshipped the Moon, 
 because even its lesser light added to his safety 
 at night. It was, therefore, natural for primi- 
 tive man when intelligence came to express his 
 idea of God in terms of Light. Apollo was to 
 the Greeks the far-darting who drove away 
 their enemies. The Israelites followed the Pil- 
 lar of Fire by night; and the Hebrew Psalmist 
 expressed this in his prayer: "Hide not thy 
 light from me, O Lord." 
 
 But savage man worshipped the Sun not 
 only because it gave him hght and safety, but 
 because it was for him his first guide to direc- 
 tion, and when he travelled it was with a care- 
 ful eye on the direction in which his shadow 
 fell. 
 
 Wherever primitive man first foimd himself, 
 it was a spot where there was enough to eat 
 to sustain life, but when the hunting or fishing 
 in the region of his cave became poor, he was 
 compelled to move in search of food. It is 
 quite certain that the earliest movements of 
 mankind were efforts to find food; a movement 
 from a place he had fished out to a place where 
 the fishing was good, or a, movement like that 
 of our own Indians, from a place where the 
 
 16 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 hunting had become poor to a new place where 
 game was abundant. When existence under 
 the then conditions seemed a hopeless task, he 
 attempted to reach another region where Na- 
 ture might be kindlier and its bounty more 
 generous. 
 
 The Stone Age men were travelers, for their 
 stone implements are found far from the quar- 
 ries out of which they were made, and shell 
 implements unquestionably brought from the 
 seashores are found far inland. 
 
 The primitive huts of the Stone Age were 
 nothing but an attempt to reproduce in the for- 
 ests the caves in which he had previously shel- 
 tered himself in the hills. 
 
 The least glimpse at the condition of primi- 
 tive man and his struggle for existence will 
 give you a new meaning of the story of the 
 Garden of Eden and show its allegorical char- 
 acter: See our primitive ancestors living amid 
 plenty, and when this plenty was exhausted, 
 driven by the outraged gods from the Garden 
 they had spoiled, out into the wilderness or 
 world in- search of food; and the Tree of 
 Knowledge itself was that better hving was to 
 be found only by laborious search. 
 
 17 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 No matter where each particular race came 
 from and no matter where it finally settled, the 
 trail between the place from which they came 
 to the place to which they went, became a beaten 
 path. Some doubtless returned to the place 
 from whence they came, if for no other purpose 
 but to bring back some stone axe or weapon 
 which had been left behind in their flight. 
 
 In his first migrations, primitive man knew 
 no better way of carrying either the remains of 
 his last kill or the stone axe with which he did 
 the killing than to drag it along with him on 
 the ground. His first real progress was made 
 when he discovered that he could lift this load 
 from the ground to his shoulders and carry it 
 there with greater ease. 
 
 It was a great day for the race when a man 
 found that he could bear a larger burden on his 
 shoulders than he could carry in his hands or 
 drag along the ground. For this discovery 
 was the beginning of settled habitations. In- 
 stead of bringing his family to the place where 
 the food was, he began to carry the food back 
 to his family. 
 
 And from that day to this the transportation 
 of food, or the other products of human labor 
 
 18 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 has, when reduced to its lowest terms, been 
 merely hmnan labor; that is, the cost in hmnan 
 labor of carrying what hviman labor has cre- 
 ated to the place where it could be consumed. 
 And primitive man could devise no relief for 
 himself from this burden, but to capture and 
 enslave the weaker members of the race and 
 compel them, by mere superior physical force, 
 to carry his burden for him. Human slavery 
 began when primitive man forced the woman 
 he had captured to carry these burdens for him. 
 
 The black race, which has never to this day 
 developed transportation beyond this point, re- 
 mains the lowest in comparative civilization and 
 has never developed sufficient intellect to in- 
 vent writing, and so has left neither literature 
 nor history nor any record of itself. 
 
 Whether in his original location or in his 
 new home, man's efforts were naturally directed 
 toward making use of that with which Nature 
 had surroimded him. His first gleams of in- 
 telligence are shown in his attempts to explain 
 the natural phenomenon peculiar to his region 
 or coimtry. 
 
 Taylor, in his valuable book on the "Early 
 Races of Mankind," has a chapter on the geo- 
 
 19 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 graphical distribution of the early myths of 
 mankind, which shows, by the very character 
 of these early myths, not only the habitat but 
 the isolation of these early people who attempt- 
 ed to express the phenomenon of Nature in the 
 terms of life as it existed for them. 
 
 Out of these myths came primitive religions. 
 They deified not only the Sim and the Moon, 
 but the phenomenon of Nature, the Winds, the 
 Waters, the Thunder and Lightning, and at- 
 tempted to appease by worship those malignant 
 forces or animals that they feared. These 
 primitive religions were so inseparably con- 
 nected with the development of the communi- 
 ties and of the nations into which they grew, 
 that they became national religions and devel- 
 oped elaborate rituals that again became inter- 
 woven into governmental forms and ceremo- 
 nies. 
 
 It was not until a much later day that re- 
 ligions took on the spiritual significance that 
 they now have, and yet, as our early students 
 of civilization were church-men, it was natural 
 that their studies should follow back along re- 
 ligious lines to these primitive myths; and it 
 is perfectly natural that their minds trained in 
 
 20 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 the discussion of theological dogma should come 
 to regard civilization as a matter of religion 
 and intellect. 
 
 Buckle states that the progress of Europe 
 from barbarism to civilization is entirely due to 
 its intellectual activity. Guizot declares that 
 civilization is the development of the human 
 mind and its faculties, but the truth is that civi- 
 liation is a fact — a state or condition in which a 
 race exists — and it expresses itself not in terms 
 of philosophic thought, but in higher standards 
 of living. 
 
 The first movements of mankind were efforts 
 to better his physical condition ; his mental ac- 
 tivities were confined to devising ways and 
 means of satisfying his physical hunger. He 
 sought first food, then more food, then better 
 food, and finally a place where he could find 
 warmer clothes, or else a place where he should 
 have less need for them. 
 
 A race oppressed by htmger and cold gave 
 little thought to the Immortality of the Soul. 
 It was only after primitive man had satisfied 
 his physical wants and reached a standard of 
 living high enough for hunger to be absent, 
 that the idea of property began to develop. 
 
 21 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 It was only, if you please, when any man 
 could go out and find his own food by his own 
 efforts, that his fellow-men required of him the 
 respecting of their property right in the food 
 that they had gathered for themselves or their 
 families. 
 
 Following this, came the recognition of 
 primitive man's right to the woman he had cap- 
 tured, and her children; and only by slow prog- 
 ress have our ethical and moral ideas grown out 
 of the development of the rights of property 
 and of family. Of course, the development of 
 these ideas did not put an end to the search for 
 food, or stiU better conditions for living. 
 
 With the Bronze Age came the building of 
 grave mounds — ^tombs — ^that marked the place 
 where the family or clan had camped and 
 where its forefathers had died. Apparently, 
 the mounds were heaped up as a sort of land- 
 mark — a means to help mankind identify the 
 places where he had formerly camped. But 
 these grave mounds, marking former camping- 
 grounds of families and clans, seem also to in- 
 dicate at this period some sort of reverence for 
 ancestors — ^the beginning, if you please, of an- 
 cestral worship. 
 
 22 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 It is significant that these earliest grave- 
 mounds of the Bronze Age are similar in char- 
 acter to the grave mounds of the Chinese at the 
 present age; a fact, too, that would indicate 
 that Chinese ancestral worship and burial sys- 
 tem started at an earUer date than the Egyp- 
 tian. For the Pyramids of Egypt are nothing 
 but gigantic grave-mounds built out of stone 
 instead of soil, and the Egyptian temples are 
 only the carved and decorated copies of the dol- 
 mens of the Stone Age. 
 
 The transition from the Stone Age to the 
 Bronze Age, as shown in the garbage heaps or 
 tumuli, is so immediate as to indicate that the 
 change was not due to evolution of the Stone 
 Age man into a Bronze Age man, but an in- 
 vasion of the habitat of the Stone Age man by 
 a race that had discovered the use of bronze; 
 so that this advance in the civilization of primi- 
 tive man was due to a higher self -transporting 
 ability of the Bronze Age man. 
 
 It was another great day for the race when 
 some man noted that a fallen tree floated on the 
 surface of the river, that he could not get 
 across, and trusting himself to the floating 
 wood, pushed, or poled himself across; and a 
 
 23 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 considerable further advance was made when it 
 was found that trees lashed together into rafts 
 would not roll or turn over and would bear 
 several men at once. 
 
 The next step in the development of man 
 came with the domestication or taming of wild 
 animals; first, probably the wolf-dog that 
 skulked about the edges of the camp and 
 gnawed the bones or refuse that primitive man 
 left. Then the taming of sheep and goats ; and 
 from that time on, primitive man, instead of 
 hunting wild sheep and goats for food, hunted 
 for better pasture for the sheep and goats that 
 he formerly hunted as wild animals. 
 
 His earhest occupation, next to hunting for 
 food for himself, he now pursued in protecting 
 from other wild animals the sheep and goats 
 that he had captured and tamed. With the 
 change in his occupation from hunter to shep- 
 herd, came a corresponding change in his 
 weapons or implements ; their distinctive char- 
 acter as weapons for killing gradually disap- 
 peared, and they came to be rather weapons or 
 implements not only for the defence of him- 
 self, but of his flocks. 
 
 Cattle and horses were not domesticated un- 
 
 24 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 til a much later date than sheep and goats. 
 The life of mankind at this stage of the race's 
 progress was constantly migratory. Whereas, 
 primitive man, at an earlier time, had wan- 
 dered in search of game and good fishing, he 
 now wandered with his flocks and herds, look- 
 ing for fresh pastures. But as mankind do- 
 mesticated the animals that he had formerly 
 hunted, so he finally learned to domesticate 
 grasses and plants. 
 
 To the spot where early man had left his 
 family, he brought the tree whose fruit had 
 pleased him in the forest, and, sticking it in the 
 earth, it grew. The edible roots and the plants 
 with succulent leaves he treated in the same 
 way, and to his little encampment he brought 
 the grasses for his cattle; and to his amaze- 
 ment, the seeds therefrom grew in exaggerated 
 and gigantic shapes in the fertilized soil about 
 the encampment. The enlarged heads of these 
 grasses proved to be the grains that have since 
 become the chief food of mankind. 
 
 This process of development has really been 
 necessary in order to permit the race to multi- 
 ply. It takes a large territory on which to 
 raise the wild game to supply the wants of a 
 
 26 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 single family. It is doubtful if there were ever 
 more than a half million of Indians in the re- 
 gion now occupied by our United States, nor 
 could the country have supported many, if any, 
 more, as long as their habits of living remained 
 the same. 
 
 But when mankind domesticated the wild 
 animals and protected the herds and flocks from 
 the attacks of other wild animals, and hunted 
 out good pasturage for them, ten times as many 
 people were able to subsist on a given territory 
 as could subsist thereon in the hunting and fish- 
 ing days. 
 
 But the real peopling of the earth was made 
 possible only by the cultivation of the soil, the 
 raising of grains, and the possibility of pro- 
 ducing the food supply for a modem state in 
 a territory that formerly sufficed only for the 
 flocks of a single chief. 
 
 But even this progress left mankind imder a 
 great handicap in its exhausting requirements 
 upon himian energy to accomplish results. This 
 is shown in the early civilization of the Egyp- 
 tians, with its wonderful temples and great 
 pyramids. Their religious development, and 
 what has come down to us of their laws and 
 
 26 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 commercial customs, shows a remarkable devel- 
 opment in intellectual ability and mechanical 
 and engineering ingenuity; but it was a civili- 
 zation that left mankind the slave of his phy- 
 sical limitations. 
 
 A himdred human hands hewed the stones 
 from the quarries; a thousand tugged at the 
 straining bands that skidded them along their 
 way to their destination; ten thousand raised 
 them by successive wedges to their final place; 
 and one hundred thousand hves were spent in 
 building a tomb for one. 
 
 Such a civilization as this was dependent 
 upon human labor for everything; not only 
 the production, but the transport of its foods 
 made necessary the enslavement of almost the 
 entire race. But there came a day when man 
 learned to harness the 'ox, and the thousands 
 who pulled at the skids were relieved to do 
 other work. 
 
 In discussing the progress of civilization, we 
 can, as I have said, ignore the Black Race 
 which has shown itself vmable to leave any rec- 
 ord of itself. The two great races with which 
 we are mostly concerned are the Turanians and 
 the Aryans, who have always been more or less 
 in conflict with each other. 
 
 27 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 The early home of the Aryan race, univer- 
 sally ascribed to the Tigro-Euphrates Basin, is 
 surrounded by plains over which a pastoral 
 people could have made progress only with 
 difficulty. These plains were occupied by the 
 Turanians, who had not only domesticated the 
 ox, but the horse, and who had learned not 
 only to transfer their burdens from their own 
 shoulders to the backs of their domesticated 
 animals, but had learned to mount themselves 
 on the backs of their horses which carried them 
 with amazing swiftness over stretches of tree- 
 less and waterless plains, upon which flocks and 
 herds would have perished. 
 
 The very names of the two races indicate 
 their difference. The word "Tura" means the 
 Swiftness of a Horse; or, in other words, the 
 Turanians were the people who moved to and 
 fro as swiftly as their horses could carry them. 
 They had emancipated themselves from the 
 weary plodding over plains, and galloped from 
 place to place on the backs of the horses that 
 they had tamed ; descending for plunder upon 
 the tents and camps of the Aryans who still 
 wandered about on foot with their flocks and 
 herds. 
 
 28 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 There can be little doubt but that the mi- 
 grations of the Aryans were due to the pres- 
 sure upon them of the Turanians, and it was 
 the Huns' before Attilla and Genghis Khan 
 and Timur who drove our ancestors out of the 
 valley of the Euphrates into the woods of Cen- 
 tral Europe. It was, in fact, these forests of 
 Europe that acted as a barrier to the fierce- 
 riding Turanians, and furnished a welcome ref- 
 uge of our Aryan ancestors. 
 
 The name "Aryan" comes from a root that 
 means "straight"; it is usually translated "erect 
 — upstanding — " or, in other words, the Aryan 
 race has been called the race that walked stand- 
 ing straight up. But it has seemed to me that 
 the term has been mis-translated. The "Tur- 
 anians" were so called because of their swift 
 riding to and fro, and the name Aryan was 
 given to our race to distinguish it from the 
 "Turanian." In other words, the Aryans were 
 those who did not go to and fro, but were those 
 who went straight, or directly, from one place 
 to another. 
 
 The horse riding Turanians, by reason of the 
 facility with which they traveled from one part 
 of the world to another on horseback, carried 
 
 29 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 over all of Europe and Asia the knowledge that 
 relieved primitive man of the necessity of bear- 
 ing his burdens on his own back and taught 
 him not only how to transfer it to the backs 
 of oxen and horses, but how, by mounting him- 
 self upon them, to relieve himself of the pre- 
 vious laborious task of transporting himself. 
 
 Our Aryan ancestors, with their more or less 
 -fixed habitat, and with the necessity upon them 
 of protecting their flocks and their herds from 
 the swift-riding Turanians, developed the use 
 of metal and the manufacture of metallic 
 weapons and shields, and with them they were 
 finally able to resist and turn back the pressure 
 of Turanian invasion. 
 
 It is in the manufacture of metal, even from 
 the earliest times, that the elements of trans- 
 portation loom large and larger, until today, 
 in what we may call the Steel Age of man's 
 development, transportation is the largest sin- 
 gle item that makes possible our enormous use 
 of iron and steel, not only in railroads, but in 
 shipbuilding and in our wonderful business 
 buildings that now tower higher to the skies 
 than anything that man has ever built before. 
 
 One day, while some Egyptians were pulling 
 
 30 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 a heavy load of rocks on skids, one of the green 
 pieces of timber slipped from its place, and, 
 falling cross-wise in front of the load, rolled 
 under the advancing skid; and to the amaze- 
 ment of those who were pulling the skid, the 
 load rolled forward faster and easier than any- 
 thing they had ever pulled before. 
 
 From the rolling trunk of a small tree to the 
 invention of wheels was- but a short step; but 
 when wheels were invented, they were the 
 greatest discovery that had been made up to 
 that time by mankind. They transformed the 
 whole method of land transportation, not only 
 doing away with the friction of the skid, but 
 relieving even the back of the ox from its bur- 
 den and enabling it to pull four or five times 
 as much as it could possibly carry. 
 
 The evolution of the wheel is worthy of a 
 book in itself, but I can here only — "call at- 
 tention to it." 
 
 To some races, these revelations never came. 
 The savage of Africa never learned to tame 
 the wild beast, and to this day bears on his own 
 shoulders every needed thing of his own when 
 he moves ; or, if too burdensome so to move, he 
 abandons it. The ivory stores of centuries still 
 
 81 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 come down to the sea on the backs of these 
 black men. 
 
 The revelation of wheels never came to our 
 American Indians. They developed far enough 
 to tame wild dogs and the Llamas of South 
 America, and ultilized these to pull the simplest 
 drags, but their brains never conceived a wheel ; 
 and while they drew a few simple hieroglyphics 
 and kept scores in knots and tallies, they, like 
 the black men, have left neither written lan- 
 guage, history nor literature. 
 
 The point I want to make is that the Negro, 
 who has never invented any sort of writing and 
 who has neither history nor literature, is the 
 lowest in point of civilization because he has 
 never emancipated himself from the slavery of 
 bearing his burdens on his own back. The In- 
 dian has emancipated himself from this burden 
 only to a limited degree, and his civilization ex- 
 presses itself in a few simple hieroglyphics. 
 
 While, as we shall see, other races who have 
 more or less emancipated themselves from this 
 burden of primitive transportation, have ad- 
 vanced in civilization in exact proportion as 
 they have so emancipated themselves. 
 
 The advance of man, that is, his ability to 
 
 32 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 better his condition, has been exactly in pro- 
 portion as he has been able to scale the moun- 
 tain, or to blaze a path through the forest, or 
 to cross the river. 
 
 His progress has been in proportion to his 
 ability to move himself from an unfavorable lo- 
 cation to a more favorable one ; to his ability to 
 transport himself and his weapons or utensils 
 from a place where unfavorable conditions sur- 
 rounded him, to a spot where Nature better 
 rewarded his struggle for existence. 
 
 In addition to the ox and the horse, primi- 
 tive man domesticated the camel, and crept out 
 over the desert. He boxed his raft, turned his 
 poles into paddles, and his paddles into oars. 
 From the time that man learned to trust him- 
 self upon the water, the waterways have been 
 the highways of civilization. 
 
 It was much easier to float down stream or 
 to pole or paddle up stream than it was to at- 
 tempt to break through the heavy vegetation 
 that bordered the streams. And, as we shall 
 see, from that time down to the development of 
 railroads, population and civihzation has stayed 
 close to the water. 
 
 The Phcenicians, who occupied the shores of 
 
 33 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 the Eastern Mediterranean for several hundred 
 miles along the coast, have left no trace of their 
 civilization beyond the foothills only six to a 
 dozen miles inland from the sea. 
 
 It is hard for us to realize how the mountains 
 and hiUs, the rivers, the forests and deserts op- 
 posed and obstructed the migration and move- 
 ment of early people. The limitations pressed 
 upon primitive man by Nature have expressed 
 themselves in some of our profoundest simihes. 
 
 The River of Death expresses, as nothing 
 else could, the limitation of the river and the 
 impossibility of returning after the river was 
 once crossed. The search for a better land be- 
 yond the river to which those who had passed 
 over had gone, expresses what they could not 
 understand in terms of the most important 
 thing in their lives. 
 
 The House of Osiris, the paradise of the 
 Egyptians, lay west across the desert sands. 
 The Islands of the Blessed lay in the Western 
 Sea beyond those that living Greeks had found 
 and the Elysian Fields were just beyond. 
 
 It was in the forests of the West that the 
 Hebrews located their Valley of the Shadows 
 and the Indians looked westward for the 
 
 34, 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 Happy Hunting Grounds. 
 
 It is hard for us to realize the isolation of 
 these early communities. The Babylonians 
 never got out of the Valley of the Euphrates. 
 The Egyptian civilization was confined to a 
 ribbon along the banks of the Nile. The Phoe- 
 nicians held barely a landing place on the shores 
 of the Mediterranean. 
 
 If your attention has never been called to it 
 before, you can not have realized the important 
 part that even primitive transportation played 
 in the development of the civilization of that 
 world that looms so large in our historical hori- 
 zon. 
 
 The progress of the Israelites northward 
 stopped at the foot of Mount Herman and 
 never really extended beyond the Jordan ; from 
 Dan to Beersheba was less than 150 miles, while 
 from Jordan on the east to Joppa on the sea, 
 was less than 50 miles. The Kingdom of Ju- 
 dea, which flourished after the secession of the 
 ten tribes, is only 50 miles square. 
 
 The flight from Bethlehem into Egypt is 
 barely 200 miles; and the Wilderness of the 
 Wanderings, where the Hebrews hid out for 
 forty years, is less than 100 miles across at its 
 
 36 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 greatest width. And Moimt Sinai, which 
 marks its southern point, is barely 200 miles 
 from the Promised Land. 
 
 Greek progress north, even in their tiny pe- 
 ninsula, was stopped by Olympus. The extreme 
 breadth of the Peloponnesus was about one 
 hundred and forty miles, or the width of the 
 State of Indiana, while its extreme length was 
 about two hundred miles. Yet, within these 
 limits, with a superficial area less than two- 
 thirds that of the State of Indiana, there were 
 six independent comjnonwealths ; while north 
 of the peninsula, a territory one hundred and 
 fifty miles north and south by two hundred and 
 fifty miles east and west, was divided among 
 no less than nine independent commonwealths. 
 
 In other words, Achai, Attica, Boetia, Doris, 
 Elis and the other Greek States, occupied, each 
 of them, a territory about the size of one of our 
 good-sized counties. And, remember, that 
 these different Grecian commonwealths had 
 each an individuality of its own, with a consid- 
 erable variation both in their spoken and writ- 
 ten tongues. 
 
 Similar conditions exist today in the so-called 
 Balkan Peninsula, where a race practically sim- 
 
 36 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 ilar in blood and ancestry, and with language 
 derived from the same source, are stiU so un- 
 intelligible to each other that they find them- 
 selves divided into half a dozen small king- 
 doms. 
 
 When William the Conqueror invaded Brit- 
 ain, he found it divided into twenty separate 
 kingdoms, with great diversity not only of 
 spoken but of written languages. It is hard 
 for us to realize that it was not until the be- 
 ginning of this last century that increased 
 means of transportation and communication 
 have brought about the diffusion of the Eng- 
 lish tongue, and the practical disappearance of 
 the Welsh and the Gaelic, of the Scotch and the 
 Irish. 
 
 Had it not been for otu- genius for trans- 
 portation, the English tongue would certainly 
 have not reached beyond the Mississippi, whUe 
 it is probable that in the region between the At- 
 lantic Coast and the Mississippi we should 
 have had some half-dozen different nations. 
 
 The myths of all the races begin with the 
 search on the part of their mythical ancestors 
 for better locations, and relate the wanderings 
 that led them into that better country that they 
 
 37 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 have sinee oc<m|Med. The Egyptian myths be* 
 gin with the wanderings of CMtis, until he es- 
 taMi^ed himself and his pasple in the fertile 
 Valley of the Nile. 
 
 The Chinese traditions begin with the wan- 
 de;Mg8 of their ancestors until, under the lead- 
 el-ship of Fu Hiy they came down along the 
 course of the YeHow KiteF into the great allu- 
 vial plaih that is now the heart of China. 
 
 Abraham wandered about Asia Minor, seek- 
 ing pasturage for his flodcs and herds, and his 
 great'^grandefaildren fled into Egypt to escape 
 the famine. Afterwards, thejr wandered for 
 forty years bef ofe they discovered the land that 
 flowed with milk and. hOney, and the lost ten 
 tribes were those that were not content even 
 with the Promised Land when they found it, 
 and kept on looking for a better one. 
 
 The Phoenieians, diiren from the coasts of 
 Tyre and Sidon, when the Israelites, under 
 Joshua, occupied the Promised Land, sailed 
 west to found a new Tripoli and Carthage. 
 From the coast of Phoenicia, Cadmus carried 
 letters and literature into Greece, but Cadmus 
 is simply the East, and the story is but a record 
 of the transportation into Greece of the art of 
 
 38 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 Ivriting thAt caiine to thefii from that direction. 
 
 Aft€* Cadmus, Hercules traveled westward 
 to ib& 6<jd of the Wo#ld, aiid there set up his> 
 pillars to mark its boundaries. The Argonauts 
 sailed in seafch of the Gc^den Fleeee, and thef 
 Wandering of Ulysses are the epic story of the 
 ptimitiYe Gteefc*s struggle with iJSTature. 
 
 The expedition against Troy gives Homer 
 an opportunity to name a thousand ships with 
 their captains ; and Aeneas fleeing from the vic- 
 torious Greeks, crept along the shore of the 
 Mediterranean, until he found the hospitable 
 hills of Italy. The White Bull that bore away 
 Europa was only a ship whose wind-filled sails 
 rounded out like the sides of a fat ox. 
 
 The Hebrews, though they knew how to 
 make bricks without straw, had no knowledge 
 of the sea, and instead of sailing down the Nile 
 and along the coast of the Mediterranean up to 
 Joppa, laboriously tramped over the desert 
 that lay between Cairo and Palestine. 
 
 When Solomon undertook to build his tem- 
 ple, it was his father's friend, King Hiram of 
 Tyre, one of the last of the Phoenicians, who 
 sent to Solomon ships and servants that had 
 knowledge of the sea. They floated the cedars 
 
 S9 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 of Lebanon in rafts down to Joppa from 
 whence they were borne by the Israelites to 
 Jerusalem; and it is recorded in Chronicles that 
 these ships of King Hiram's sailed to Ophir 
 and brought back four hundred and fifty tal- 
 ents of gold and precious stones and strange 
 woods, out of which were made new and won- 
 derful things, the like of which had never be- 
 fore been seen in the Land of Judea. 
 
 The benefits of this early trade so impressed 
 Solomon that he employed the ships and ser- 
 vants of Hiram, and once every three years 
 the fleet made a trip to Tarshish and back, 
 bringing gold and silver and ivory and apes 
 and peacocks, so that silver became in Jerusa- 
 lem as the stones in the street; and Solomon 
 passed all the Kings of the earth in riches and 
 wisdom. 
 
 For awhile, the world was practically divided 
 between two great races, one of which con- 
 trolled the land, by reason of its ability to trav- 
 el over it on horseback; and the other, the rivers 
 and sea and the land that bordered thereon, by 
 reason of their skill in boat building. 
 
 Heroditus relates that the Phcenicians built 
 a fleet on the Red Sea and sailed around the 
 
 40 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 South Coast of Africa, returning by way of the 
 Pillars of Hercules — the Straits of Gibraltar 
 — ^but Heroditus, while recording the story, re- 
 fused to believe it, because, he says, in reporting 
 the course of their journey around the shore of 
 Africa, they declared that they went so far 
 south that they saw the course of the Sun in 
 the Heavens lying to their North ; and this, the 
 historian declares, is so incredible that he re- 
 fuses to accept the rest of their account of their 
 voyage. Heroditus, thus, by his incredulity, 
 records the very fact that proves the truth of 
 the Phoenicians' account of their voyage. 
 
 Some one has called attention to the fact 
 that a people, busy with material things, en- 
 gaged in subduing the wilderness and conquer- 
 ing Nature, has no time left, after the secur- 
 ing of the necessary food and clothing, for the 
 development of intellect. Until this work is 
 done that there is no time for the cultivation 
 of hterature, and the records are crude, simple, 
 coarse and direct. 
 
 Not until Nature has become so generous 
 as to leave the race leisure, do those niceties 
 of style develop that make literature. And it 
 was in Greece that Nature seems, for the first 
 
 41 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 tiine^ tof h&ve been so generous with man as to 
 gite km this ojjportumty; so it was here thai a 
 eivilJZHtioR was dev^oped^ wiifa a literature of 
 hemitifvil and sonorous words^ and here th^t 
 there Was first found leisure for metaphysijeal 
 thbqgiit. 
 
 But the civilization of the Greeks, suprefioe 
 in its da.fi was limited to its small PeninsaM 
 ai^ to sueh nearby islands as they were able 
 to Feax:h' with their prinritive boats. Thucydides 
 records the fact that until the expedition of 
 Xerxes the Greeks used only small open boats, 
 and that it was not until tttey had been com* 
 pelled for self -protection, to build and equip a 
 fleet to oppose that of the Persians, that they 
 learned the importance and necessity of navi- 
 gation. 
 
 Their first efforts, after the repulse of the 
 Persians, were to copy the decked vessels pro- 
 pelled by banks of oars that were used by the 
 Persian invaders. But their limitations on the 
 sea become apparent to us now, when we real- 
 ize how near Italy is to Greece, and yet know 
 that Italy was discovered not by Greeks going 
 westward, but by the Carthagenians drifting 
 north, 
 
 42 
 
CiVltlZAtlOJf 
 
 The dviBzaiion of Rome develop^ slowly 
 ifi the sftfiie -WAji With its growth d,nd popa- 
 l^tic^ md its iiicreaise in ttstde, it 6ame taere 
 mi mote iftto eonrmunieAtioh with the stif- 
 toUftdifig countries, adding to its own civiliza- 
 tion wMt it w&s able to asisimilate from the na-> 
 tions with which it had communieatlon and 
 tr&ffi^' 
 
 And yet how primitive these means of com- 
 mfonieation were is proven by the fact that in 
 ispite of its physical nearness, it took fire hun- 
 dred years for the intellectual and artistic spirit 
 of Gre^e to penetrate Rome. 
 
 WMe Greece toas spending her energy in 
 art fOrTTiSj Rome 'was buUditig roads. Firet 
 throughout her own country; so that, though 
 the Romans occupied a territory several times 
 larger than that of the Greeks, there was little 
 variation either in the Roman tongue or the 
 written language. It was this that gave the 
 Romans a homogeneity that was never pos- 
 sessed by the Greeks — a sense of national 
 unity. 
 
 But the Political Conquest of Greece by the 
 Romans was due to the Roman Triremes, the 
 swiftest ships that had been built in the world 
 
 43 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 up to that time. Driven by their triple banks 
 of trained rowers, they swept the Mediterra- 
 nean and carried the Roman Legions from Al- 
 exandria and Byzantimn to the Pillars of Her- 
 cules ; while back to Rome herself, they brought 
 the peoples, products and vices of the con- 
 quered nations. 
 
 The art of shipbuilding was held so highly 
 by the Romans that serfs without property 
 rights or testamentary capacity, were, if able 
 to build or navigate ships, given their liberty 
 with the right to hold office and to dispose of 
 their property by will. The Roman fleets be- 
 came so numerous that they were said to have 
 made bridges from Rome to all the Roman 
 provinces; Cicero declared that: "He who holds 
 the sea is the ruler of the world." In the phrase 
 "Carthago Delenda Est," Cato but voiced the 
 Roman protest against their only rival on the 
 seas. 
 
 Have you ever wondered, in reading the 
 History of the Punic Wars, how the Cartha- 
 genians happened to be crossing the Alps and 
 attacking Italy from the north? If you will 
 look at your maps, you will see the answer. It 
 ivas safer for the Carthagenian fleets to coast 
 
 44 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 along the shories of Africa, across the narrow 
 Straits of Gibraltar, and along the Eastern 
 slopes of Spain and Southern France, than it 
 was to attempt to cross even the narrow sea 
 between Carthage and Rome, without the sight 
 of land. 
 
 The Romans never advanced beyond the oar 
 as the means of propulsion, and while their 
 Triremes could sweep the seas, they could not 
 cover the land, and so the Roman Legions built 
 roads through every country which they con- 
 quered in Europe, North Africa and Asia Mi- 
 nor, and over these roads with the swift Tri- 
 remes running between their ends and Rome, 
 was Roman civilization scattered over the then 
 known world, and the Latin tongue made prac- 
 tically universal among those who pretended 
 to learning and education. It was this that 
 made the Latin language the one in which 
 learning was preserved and transmitted 
 through the so-called Dark Ages, until the re- 
 vival of learning began. 
 
 But when the Roman Legions, worn out by 
 fighting and road building, rested and became 
 degenerate through plxmder and luxury, when 
 the Roman Legions ceased to be Roman and 
 
 46 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 beesERe bands of hired fighters who shared m 
 the spoils formerly given to Romans alone, 
 then the Goths, from which these mercenary 
 legions had been recruited, looked longingly 
 toward Rome and finally poured back into 
 Italy, over the very roads that the Roman Le- 
 gions had built, into their country. 
 
 Had the Goths been compelled to fight their 
 way through a wilderness, it is doubtful wheth- 
 er they would have ever reached Rome. But 
 the Roman-built roads facilitated their prog- 
 ress, and no longer guarded by Romans but by 
 Legions made up of their brothers, they flew 
 to the sack of the city that had called them 
 to her service. And the Legions, in sport, 
 raised favorite after favorite to the throne of 
 Augustus. Greek, African, Spaniard, lUy- 
 rian, succeeded each other. Diocletian had 
 been a Dalmation slave, while Constantine the 
 Great was the son of an Asiatic herdsman and 
 a Dacian captive. 
 
 The natural barriers to travel, and the difii- 
 culties in the way of communication against 
 which the Legions of Rome had struggled, op- 
 erated to isolate the several famiUes that peo- 
 pled Europe, and so permitted in Europe, as 
 
 46 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 it had before in Asia Minor and Greece, the 
 growth of half a dozen different civilizations 
 and languages on one small continent; each 
 civilization limited to the community lying 
 within some natural zone or region marked off 
 by mountain ranges, rivers and sea. 
 
 Europe did not wake until slowly increasing 
 population pressed out and turned the forest 
 trails into highways, along which came the in- 
 terchange of ideas between these races and na- 
 tions; and it was the comparison of their own 
 conditions with the conditions of others that 
 quickened the intellectual life of the people of 
 Europe and brought on the Renaissance. 
 
 The Beginning of Modern Civilization. 
 
 Buckle declares the greatest forces in the 
 civilization of Europe to have been the influence 
 of gunpowder, the invention of printing, and 
 the discovery of political economy, but he fails 
 to show the way in which these were brought 
 into Europe. 
 
 About 650 A. D., during the reign of the 
 second Emperor of the Tang Dynasty, a fleet 
 of Chinese junks sailed around Indo-China 
 and India into the Persian Gulf, along the 
 coasts of Arabia and into the Red Sea. From 
 
 47 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 this expedition the Axahs first learned the use 
 of the compass, and this was transmitted by 
 them to the Mediterranean sailors. 
 
 The Decline of Constantinople really began 
 in the ninth century, when coasting no longer 
 became necessary, for, by the use of the com- 
 pass, the trade of the Orient began passing di- 
 rectly from Bagdad to the cities of Italy. Up 
 to this time all Mediterranean traffic had 
 hugged the shores, carrying neither provisions 
 nor water for their voyage, but trusting to ob- 
 tain these on land at short intervals. 
 
 The spirit of adventure in Italy did not die 
 with the fall of Rome, and Italian slave dealers 
 and merchants roamed the then known seas, 
 gradually penetrating farther and farther into 
 the world vmknown to them. 
 
 In the latter part of the thirteenth century 
 some Venetians named Polo returned from the 
 country beyond Ind. They had followed back 
 to their homes the conquering hordes of Ghen- 
 gis Khan which had so recently impinged on 
 Europe. Upon their return, the Polos gave 
 the Venetians their first account of firearms, 
 printed books, paper money, and other strange 
 things. The Polos made a second trip across 
 
 48 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 Asia to China, returning by sea around India. 
 Following their return, they engaged in wars 
 between Venice and Genoa, and the younger 
 Polo, Marco, was captured by the Genoese. 
 During his imprisonment he dictated to a fel- 
 low prisoner an account of his journeys. 
 
 The importance of the narration of Marco 
 Polo is shown by the fact that, although it was 
 first written about 1298 or 1300, almost one 
 hundred manuscript copies of it, in the differ- 
 ent tongues of Europe, are preserved to us to 
 this day. 
 
 Originally written in French, it was soon 
 translated into two or three Italian dialects, 
 and within ten years, diu-ing Marco Polo's 
 lifetime, it was translated into Latin at the 
 request of the priests of one of the largest 
 monasteries in Italy, in order that it might be 
 preserved as a classic for all time. 
 
 In 1403 and in 1426 Chinese fleets again ap- 
 peared in the Red Sea. One of these expedi- 
 tions brought a quantity of Chinese porcelain 
 of this period to Mecca; and some of this por- 
 celain was, in 1487, presented by the Sultan to 
 Lorenzo de Medici. 
 
 In 1426, the year that the last Chinese Ex- 
 
 49 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 pedition appeared in the Red Sea, Prince 
 Pedro of Portugal, being on a trip to Venice, 
 was presented by the seignory, or government, 
 of Venice with a Latin copy of Marco Polo's 
 book ; and although this particular manuscript 
 seems to be lost, there is in existence a Portu- 
 guese manuscript that recites that it was trans- 
 lated from Prince Pedro's Latin copy. 
 
 The importance in which Polo's account was 
 held is also shown by the fact that a German 
 translation of it was among the first books 
 ever printed. It was printed in Nuremberg in 
 1477. Another edition was printed in Augs- 
 burg in 1481, and a Latin edition, without 
 place or date, was printed — probably in Venice 
 about 1485. 
 
 In order to show the close connection be- 
 tween Polo's account of the development of the 
 art of navigation and the discovery of 
 America, it is only necessary to call attention 
 to the fact that one of the most important diap- 
 ters in Polo's book is devoted to the art of ship- 
 building and navigation as practiced by the 
 Chinese, which was declared by him to be ex- 
 cellent beyond anything that Europe had 
 known. 
 
 so 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 This was the foundation of the Portuguese 
 experiments in navigation, following the car- 
 rying back to Lisbon by Prince Pedro of a 
 copy of Polo's book. A copy of the first Latin 
 edition of Polo's book was a prized possession 
 of Christopher Columbus. This identical book 
 is now in the Colombena at Seville, and con- 
 tains over one hundred autograph notes in Co- 
 lumbus's own hand, showing how closely the 
 great navigator had studied it. 
 
 Historians have commented on the fact that 
 European history does not record the name of 
 the man who invented gunpowder; but there 
 is good reason for this. He never existed 1 
 Those Venetian travelers who brought back 
 Chinese guns and gxmpowder, brought back 
 with them the formula for making gunpowder; 
 and when Europe adopted firearms, it adopted 
 not only the gunpowder that came from China, 
 but even the form and shape of the Chinese 
 gun as it had been in use by the Chinese for 
 hundreds of years. 
 
 The earliest weapons of European manu- 
 facture, preserved in the Museimas of Europe, 
 are exact copies of those old Chinese firearms 
 whose shape the Chinese, with then* strange 
 
 SI 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 persistence, have preserved even to this day. 
 
 The same thing is true with the art of print- 
 ing. Those first Chinese books brought back 
 to Venice were passed around as curiosities; 
 and doubtless many of them went northward 
 from Venice, in some Italian caravan, up 
 through the mountain passes into the German 
 plain; until they became familiar to the learned 
 men of Augsburg, Ulm and Nurnberg; and 
 all that Faust and Gutenberg ever did was to 
 appreciate the possibility of adapting this Chi- 
 nese art to their own language. 
 
 It is proof of the source of their inspiration 
 that their first books were printed in a German 
 type that approximates as nearly as possible 
 the size, shape and modeling of the Chinese 
 character used in the books from which they 
 got their ideas. While political economy was 
 developed only after travel had called atten- 
 tion to contrasts and given sufficient data for 
 comparisons. 
 
 The study of Chinese civilization is particu- 
 larly interesting and suggestive to us in the 
 consideration of the present matter, for the 
 reason that we have here a civilization as old, or 
 older, than the Egyptian— highly developed 
 
 52 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 along its political and ethical lines, but so 
 stagnant in matters of physical condition that 
 we can find there preserved for us to this day 
 conditions that approximate those that we find 
 preserved for us in Egypt only in the sculp- 
 tiu-es and pictures of rifled tconbs. 
 
 The Chinese speak of their first ancestors as 
 "pastors," recognizing their pastoral character 
 and nomadic life, but soon after they occupied 
 China they turned their attention to the devel- 
 opment of the means of transportation and 
 inter-communication. In no other coxmtry 
 have the smallest rivers and streams been util- 
 ized as they have in China. The smallest boats, 
 drawing but a few inches, are poled to the head- 
 waters of every creek, In addition to this, the 
 Chinese began early the building of their won- 
 derful system of canals. Every succeeding 
 dynasty extended this system of canal building 
 as much for miKtary purposes as for trade, for 
 carrying the armies of the invaders and bring- 
 ing back the tribute rice from the conquered 
 provinces. Forty canals across the United 
 States from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts 
 and fifty more from our northern boundaries 
 to the Gulf would not suffice to equal the 
 
 63 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 canals that the Chinese built; to carry on theit 
 internal commerce. 
 
 Draper attributes the remarkable homoge- 
 neousness of the Chinese to the increased inter- 
 communication that was so wonderfully devel- 
 oped by their canal system, but this means of 
 transportation and communication was slow, 
 and while it has given them a single written 
 language throughout their country, it has not 
 sufficed to produce a universal spoken lan- 
 guage, for the slowness of this transportation, 
 amoimting to scarcely thirty or forty miles a 
 day, has succeeded only in producing uniform- 
 ity of language along the main lines of their 
 great rivers and chief canals. As soon as you 
 move at right angles to these main lines of 
 traffic the isolation of the people makes itself 
 felt and you have a new dialect for practically 
 every hundred miles. It has been estimated by 
 Professor King that there are 200,000 miles 
 of canals, or improved waterways, in China; 
 or, in other words, the Chinese in a country 
 only one-third the size of the United States, 
 have built almost as many nules of canals as 
 we have constructed miles of- railroad in our 
 own country. 
 
 64 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 The canal system in China was a great in- 
 centive to the development of internal com- 
 merce and traffic and it resulted in the Chinese 
 early reaching that development of commerce 
 and that high respect for property in transit 
 that gave the Chinese banknotes, letters of 
 credit and bills of exchange, a thousand years 
 before they were known in Europe. It was 
 the Chinese respect for property, and this early 
 development of commerce, with all that that 
 term means, that gave the Chinese their atti- 
 tude toward war, and resulted in the practical 
 abolition of war in China during the cen- 
 turies when the nations of Europe were ravag- 
 ing and plundering each other. It resulted, 
 too, in .that enormous growth of population 
 which has made the great problem in China 
 the equalizing of the great supply of labor 
 that has existed in every community with the 
 limited demand for it. 
 
 As their civilization developed, population 
 grew and a constantly increasing supply of 
 labor found a steadily decreasing demand for 
 it, until wages were reduced to the lowest pos- 
 sible point at which hmnan existence could be 
 maintained, but with all the cheapness of 
 
 56 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 human labor the cost of transportation in 
 China has been, and is, a terrible tax upon the 
 business of the country and upon the cost of 
 living, and there are physical hmitations which 
 are hard for us to understand, comparable only 
 with the difficulties of our early wagon trains 
 crossing the plains in carrying enough to sup- 
 ply themselves for the journey without at- 
 tempting to carry any surplus for trade. 
 
 I want, if possible, to translate the cost of 
 transportation by these primitive means into 
 Twentieth Centmy terms, and see if I can 
 make you understand what transportation and 
 its cost means to civiUzation. The common 
 Chinese cart with two mules only imdertake to 
 haul a thousand pounds a distance of twenty 
 miles in a day at a cost of $1.25. This is a 
 cost per ton-mile of I2I/2 cents. 
 
 In China a single man with a pole and 
 baskets wUl carry eighty poimds about twenty- 
 five miles a day at a cost of ten cents, or at 
 the rate of 11 cents per ton-mile. 
 
 Two men with a wheelbarrow vrill move 
 from three hundred and fifty to four hundred 
 pounds a distance of eighteen or twenty miles 
 in a day at a cost of 26 cents, or about 8 cents 
 
 66 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 per ton-mile, and camel trains or pack animals 
 are little cheaper. 
 
 Compare this, if you please, with the freight 
 charges of our great trunk lines, say the Saint 
 Paul, with an average charge of six and one- 
 half mills per ton-mile, or the New York Cen- 
 tral and Pennsylvania systems with average 
 charges of only about six mills per ton-mile. 
 The average of all our American railroads is 
 less than 1 cent per ton-mile, while on some 
 commodities it is as low as three mills. 
 
 Remember that this Chinese cost of transpor- 
 tation — twelve and one-half times greater than 
 the average rate of all American railroads and 
 twenty times greater than that of some of our 
 great systems — is paid by a people whose wage 
 scale and standard of living is less than one- 
 twentieth that of our own. So that the actual 
 proportionate cost — ^that is cost in proportion 
 to ability to pay — of such transportation to 
 the Chinese people is from two hundred and 
 fifty to three himdred times greater than the 
 cost of our transportation is to us. 
 
 With this explanation of the development 
 and cost of transportation in China, turn back 
 to Europe and note the condition in England 
 
 67 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 only two hundred years ago. 
 
 Draper in describing the condition of Eng- 
 knd in the reign of Queen Anne says : "Noth- 
 ing more strikingly shows the social condition 
 than the provisions for locomotion. In the 
 rainy seasons the roads were all but impassable. 
 Through gullies, half filled with mud, car- 
 riages were dragged, often by oxen, or when 
 horses were used, it was a matter of necessity 
 to drive half a dozen of tiiem. 
 
 "If the country was open the track of the 
 road was easily mistaken. It was no uncom- 
 mon thing for persons to lose their way and 
 have to spend the night out in the air. Be- 
 tween places of considerable importance the 
 roads were sometimes very little known, and 
 such was the difficulty for wheeled carriages 
 that the principal mode of transport was by 
 pack-horses, of which passengers took advan- 
 tage, stowing themselves away between the 
 packs. 
 
 "The usual charge for freight was -fifteen 
 pence (30 cents) per ton-mile. 
 
 "It was not until the close of the century 
 what were termed 'flying coaches' were estab- 
 lished; they could move at the rate of from 
 
 68 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 thirty to fifty miles in a day. Many persons 
 thought the risk so great that it was a tempt- 
 ing of Providence to go in them." 
 
 Now it is significant that the cost of trans- 
 portation in England here disclosed is practi- 
 cally the identical cost of transportation shown 
 in China under the same sort of conditions. In 
 China where the wage scale is practically 10 
 cents a day, it costs 10 cents per ton-mile to 
 move freight; or in other words, the average 
 cost per ton-mile to move freight is the price 
 of one man's work for one day. 
 
 At the time of Queen Anne when, as Draper 
 says : "The cost per ton-mile of moving freight 
 was 15 pence, or 30 cents," the average wage 
 of labor was 1 shilling, or 25 cents, so that in 
 England the cost per ton-mile was a trifle more 
 than the wage of one man for one day. 
 
 You have seen how under primitive condi- 
 tions transportation is simply human labor, 
 and that the cost of transportation is simply 
 the cost of human labor necessary to carry the 
 product to market, and you have seen the suc- 
 cessive efforts made to relieve human labor of 
 this burden, and this brings us to the begin- 
 ning of the final stage in the development of 
 
 69 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 the means of transportation. 
 
 The world has conceded to the Chinese the 
 invention of gunpowder and the invention of 
 printing, to both of which the civilization of 
 Europe is under the greatest obligation. But 
 I am going to claim another thing for this an- 
 cient Empire, and that is the discovery of the 
 art of navigation. 
 
 It is hard to xmderstand the primitive condi- 
 tion of sailing as it existed up to the middle 
 of the Fifteenth Century. Evelyn declares 
 that : "At the time of the French invasion of 
 Britain that there was not a pilot to be found 
 who dared venture twenty leagues from land ; 
 that all commerce by boats, sneaked along the 
 shores, and that the French captains would not 
 even venture to cross the English Channel 
 unless it was clear enough for them to see the 
 other shore." 
 
 The world has conceded to China the inven- 
 tion of the compass, but students of civilization 
 have overlooked the f 3,ct that the Chinese were 
 the first race that learned to bend the wind to 
 their will and sail into the teeth of the gale. 
 The sailors of Europe had coasted before the 
 wind in floating up, or down, the Mediter- 
 
 60 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 ranean, but the Chinese seamen for centuries 
 had been sailing to distant islands and coming 
 back. As early as the Seventh Century Chi- 
 nese mariners had sailed around India into the 
 Red Sea and made the Arabs acquainted with 
 their compass. 
 
 The seagoing junks of the Chinese that were 
 seen by those Venetian travellers during the 
 Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, were 
 stauncher than any of those that Europe had 
 built up to that time. And the discovery of 
 these boats, together with their compasses and 
 their art of sailing into the wind, were brought 
 back to Europe by those same travelers that 
 brought gimpowder, Chinese guns and the art 
 of printing. 
 
 It is no mere coincidence that the ships of 
 Columbus that sailed westward to find the new 
 world, and those of De Gama that sailed 
 around Africa to India, were built after the 
 models of the Chinese oceangoing junks, less 
 than fifty years after Faust and Gutenberg had 
 adapted the Chinese art of printing to the Ger- 
 man alphabet. 
 
 The success of the Portuguese in the art of 
 navigation stimulated the Spanish to great en- 
 
 61 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 deavors and the caravels in which Columbus 
 crossed the ocean rapidly grew into the gal- 
 lions which brought back the treasures of the 
 New World to Spain. This mastery of the 
 art of navigation gave Spain the commanding 
 place in the world, with Portugal only a scant 
 length behind. France and England looked 
 on the commerce and wealth of Spain and Por- 
 tugal with envious eyes, but it was not until 
 English seamen conceived and bxiilt the British 
 Frigate in the latter part of the Sixteenth Cen- 
 tury that England was able to dispute the 
 leadership of the Spanish and the French. 
 
 The Spanish Gallion was huge and sea- 
 worthy, but climasy and unwieldy, while the 
 British Frigate was the easiest handled ship 
 and the best sailer that had yet been invented. 
 It is related in history as an illustration of the 
 superiority of the British Frigate over the 
 Spanish Gallion, that one English Frigate 
 with a crew of only one hundred and eighty 
 men met a Spanish fleet of fifty gallion which 
 it fought singlehanded for twenty-four hours, 
 sinking four of the Spanish ships and causing 
 a loss to the Spanish fleet of seven thousand 
 men, finally escaping herself with a loss of 
 
 62 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 only ninety — or about one-half of her own 
 crew. It was this development of shipbuilding 
 and mastery of the art of seamanship that 
 enabled the English to wipe out the Spanish 
 Armada, defeat the French Navies and estab- 
 lish the British Empire around the world. 
 
 Buckle states: "That the advance of civili- 
 zation depends upon three things; first, the 
 knowledge of a country's ablest men; second, 
 the direction which that knowledge takes, or 
 the subjects upon which it is expended, and 
 third, the diffusion of that knowledge." But 
 Buckle failed to realize, or to see at all, that all 
 of these things are dependent upon the devel- 
 opment of transportation and the means of 
 communication. 
 
 The knowledge of a country's ablest men 
 depends upon their ability to travel over the 
 known world and discover those things that 
 have escaped the observations of others. And 
 the direction which that knowledge takes de- 
 pends upon the new inclination given to it by 
 the observations and discourses of these trav- 
 elers; while the diffusion of knowledge itself 
 absolutely depends upon the facilities for 
 transportation. 
 
 63 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 The ablest men of European countries had 
 by the middle of the Sixteenth Century practi- 
 cally the same amount of knowledge, for the 
 multiplication of books during the seventy-five 
 years that followed the introduction of print- 
 ing into Europe had placed at the disposal of 
 every European student practically all the 
 knowledge that was the possession of any. 
 
 But the diffusion of this knowledge had been 
 slow. It had naturally followed the existing 
 lines of travel. Beginning in Italy, whose 
 travelers had brought back these new discov- 
 eries from Arabia, and the Orient, it had crept 
 north into Europe ; first, from Venice, through 
 Augsberg and Nurnberg, and from thence 
 over to the Rhine and then down the Rhine past 
 Frankfort and Mayence to the Lowlands, and 
 thence from Amsterdam, Antwerp and Rot- 
 terdam across to England. Another line crept 
 from Genoa up the Rhone VaUey to Geneva, 
 and thence across into France, Dijon and 
 Paris. 
 
 The direction of this knowledge and of its 
 students was influenced first by the character 
 of the material then at hand, and second, the 
 influence and position of the Church. There 
 
 64< 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 had come to be a general feeling that physical 
 conditions could not be improved and that the 
 best that could be done, was to save the souls 
 of poor humanity. It has always been, more 
 or less, of a religious principle with mankind 
 to regard local conditions as perfect, or at least 
 as definitely or finally settled, and as having 
 Divine sanction. 
 
 The Church encouraged this view because it 
 perpetuated its influence and power. The 
 Chin-ch had been the possessor of such learning 
 as existed, and the temporal power of the 
 Church had placed its priests in control over 
 the social and political conditions of the people. 
 
 It was, therefore, impossible to discuss social 
 or political conditions without reflecting upon 
 the Church's management of them, and it was 
 this that made heresy out of all the suggestions 
 for the improvement of the social and political 
 conditions of the people. And so it was that 
 reformers of that day habitually adopted the 
 style of putting their reform tracts into the 
 shape of books of travel with accounts of the 
 wondrous customs, freedoms and advantages 
 enjoyed by other people in imaginary lands. 
 
 At this time in Europe — populations had 
 
 65 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 become fixed, the people were attached to the 
 soil, and not only were the lines sharply drawn 
 between nations and races, but within the na- 
 tions themselves the lines were sharply drawn 
 between classes. 
 
 Land had been the representative of author- 
 ity and the source of power, and a descending 
 scale of limited proprietors had been estab- 
 lished. Under this system every man had a 
 place assigned to him. The possession of land 
 was a trust, not a property. Kings ruled by 
 divine right ; barons held their land in fief from 
 the crown, and the common people in lease 
 from the barons. 
 
 The Feudal system was a mere expression 
 of the physical impossibility of securing the 
 allegiance of people to a King or Over Lord 
 too remote to be ever seen. It prevails in some 
 degree in every country, while the means of 
 communication are limited and slow, and it 
 disappears gradually in exact proportion as 
 these increase. 
 
 It was at this time that the seagoing vessels 
 that had learned to tack in the face of the wind 
 discovered America, and sailed around the 
 Cape of Good Hope. The returning adventur- 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 ers from the West brought back the gold of 
 the Montezumas and the Incas. Those follow- 
 ing the new route to India and the Orient 
 brought back silks and jewels. Trading com- 
 panies were established to finance expeditions 
 to the West and East Indies. With the dis- 
 covery of an easy way around Africa, the Brit- 
 ish and Dutch ports became nearer to both the 
 East and West Indies than were the Mediter- 
 ranean ports, and the trade that had formerly 
 come to Venice, Genoa and Marseilles, rapidly 
 faded away. 
 
 Men were unsettled not only by the nmiors, 
 but by the knowledge of enormous fortunes 
 rapidly gained in foreign adventure, and com- 
 merce was beginning to disturb the founda- 
 tions on which all previous political conditions 
 had been standing. Society was disrupted; the 
 spirit of loyalty to the old regime faded before 
 the dreams of advancing self-interest that 
 promised so much for the individual. 
 
 For the first time in history a premium was 
 put on speed of carriage, and kings fitted out 
 fleets of fast sailing ships to take possession 
 of as much as they could get of this new world. 
 
 From the first, the problem of transporta- 
 
 67 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 tion was the paramount one with the discov- 
 erers and the colonists. First, of transporta- 
 tion from the old, helpless and discouraging 
 conditions to this new world, and second, as 
 soon as the first colonies were estahlished, the 
 problem of transportation, ever westward, into 
 the wilderness where each dissatisfied individual 
 hoped to find as much of an opportimity for 
 himself as the first comers had found where 
 they first landed. 
 
 The lands which these colonists seized and 
 settled upon cost them nothing but the expense 
 of reaching them. But as soon as the colonies 
 were settled, these lands began to take on 
 value, not in proportion to their richness, but 
 in proportion of their accesjiibiKty. The first 
 colonies were established, not at points where 
 the richest lands were found, but at places 
 where suitable harbors could be established. 
 
 And it was natural with the then existing 
 methods of transportation, that the further ex- 
 tension of the colonies should be, as they were, 
 along the water courses. Massachusetts Bay 
 Colony extended up the Charles River. New 
 Amsterdam crept up along the shores of the 
 Hudson and then westward up the Valley of 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 the Mohawk. Pennsylvania up along the 
 Delaware and the Susquehanna, Maryland up 
 the Potomac, Virginia up the James and 
 Georgia up the Savannah to Augusta. 
 
 The rich lands that lay between these rivers 
 were neglected because it was of no avail to 
 raise twice as much tobacco on these inland 
 farms, if its value was consumed in reaching 
 the river. Land along the rivers brought from 
 twenty dollars to forty doUars per acre; that 
 five or ten miles back from the river brought 
 only ten to twenty dollars per acre; that from 
 ten to fifteen miles back brought only five to 
 ten dollars per acre, while back of fifteen miles 
 land was practically unmarketable and was 
 offered freely at twenty-five cents per acre. 
 
 In order to be of value, lands must be acces- 
 sible and their products transferable to market 
 at a cost that shall not consimae the value of 
 the product in transportation. 
 
 At the time of the French and Indian War 
 the proposition to acquire Canada was opposed 
 by many English on the groimd that it was 
 truly useless, as, in fact, were the western parts 
 of the colonies already held. They agreed that 
 there was a certain distance from the sea in 
 
 69 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 America beyond which the expense of carrying 
 put a stop to the sale and consumption of Eng- 
 lish manufactures, and that this distance was 
 limited to two hundred miles, or to the Ap- 
 palachian Mountain Range; that to permit the 
 colonies to extend their settlements beyond that 
 distance would not only render them useless to 
 England, but, through the difficulty of com- 
 merce, would compel the inhabitants beyond to 
 manufacture for themselves and so become in- 
 dependent. It was Benjamin Franklin who 
 answered this objection. In 1760 he declared 
 "That the great inland rivers and lakes of 
 America made this western country accessible, 
 except for the shortest of portages." "It was 
 only necessary," he said, "in order to reach 
 Lake Ontario from New York, to make a short 
 portage of twenty-seven miles; that from Lake 
 Ontario to Lake Erie the land carriage around 
 Niagara was only twelve miles, and that from 
 Lake Erie there was 2,700 miles of lake and 
 river passage without obstruction; that from 
 Presque Isle on Lake Erie it took but fifteen 
 miles of a portage to reach the headwaters of 
 Beef River, a branch of the Ohio, whidi made 
 accessible thousands of miles of inland rivers 
 
 70 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 through Ohio, Mississippi and the great rivers 
 that run into them." He further called atten- 
 tion to the fact that Russian iron was brought 
 three thousand miles by land and water from 
 the heart of Siberia, and that it had been found 
 worth while to keep up a mercantile connection 
 between Peking and St. Petersburg over a 
 desert of seven thousand miles. 
 
 It is a fact not generally known that in pro- 
 portion to our population, the early Americans 
 were the greatest canal builders the world has 
 ever seen. As soon as the river banks were 
 pre-empted, the colonists began improving the 
 smaller waterways and building canals, for 
 there was ever before them the enormous profits 
 resulting from making accessible the rich lands 
 of the interior. 
 
 The three states of New York, Pennsyl- 
 vania and Ohio, with the Federal Government, 
 expended upwards of $150,000,000 in the con- 
 struction of canals between the years of 1800 
 and 1826. The Erie Canal alone, from Albany 
 to Buffalo, cost in excess of $50,000,000. While 
 from the lake two separate canals were con- 
 structed south across Ohio to the Ohio River. 
 
 Before the Erie Canal was opened. New 
 
 71 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 York and Boston were equal in exports, but 
 both were behind Philadelphia and the Virginia 
 ports. Philadelphia led in population and 
 manufacturers, but it cost $100 per ton to bring 
 freight from the interior down to tidewater. 
 The Erie Canal, from the Hudson River up the 
 Mohawk Valley to the lakes, was opened in 
 1825 and freight rates dropped at once to $10 
 a ton from lake ports to New York, 
 
 Traffic flowed to New York as naturally as 
 water flows down hill, and within six years- 
 after the opening of the canal the exports of 
 New York were three times greater than those 
 of Boston and five times greater than those of 
 Philadelphia or Baltimore. It was the Erie 
 Canal with the commerce that it developed that 
 built up the string of great cities across New 
 York, that has given the State of New York 
 the lead in the number of large cities over every 
 other State in the Union. As the result of. 
 building these canals the population of the 
 States through which they were built increased 
 enormously at the expense of their neighbors 
 who were without these means of transporta- 
 tion. 
 
 Immediately after the Revolution, some ex- 
 
 72 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 periments had been made on the Potomac 
 River in which George Washington himself 
 was interested. It was midertaken to install a 
 sawmill engine on a barge, and use the saw 
 machine to drive two sets of paddles. Other 
 experiments with the use of steam to propel 
 boats were tried on the Delaware, and in 1807 
 Fulton made the steamboat a commercial suc- 
 cess for the first time, on the Hudson. 
 
 This discovery gave a great impetus to the 
 interior States and gave added value, not only 
 to the canals that had been built, but to our 
 inland waterways. Within five or six years 
 after the first successful steamer had plied the 
 Hudson, far greater and finer steamers were 
 going down the Ohio from Pittsburgh, Cincin- 
 nati and Louisville to New Orleans, and up the 
 head-waters of the Mississippi and the Mis- 
 souri. 
 
 Had the discovery of steamboats been made 
 by the French before 1800, the Louisiana Pur- 
 chase would never have been made and the Mis- 
 sissippi would probably have been the boundary 
 between two nations ; one on the East speaking 
 English, and the one on the West, French. 
 
 In 1790 the State of Virginia had three- 
 
 78 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 quarters of a million population. Pennsyl- 
 vania only a little over four hundred thousand, 
 and New York State only three hundred and 
 forty thousand, while Ohio had only a few 
 hundreds. 
 
 By 1830, while Virginia had increased to 1,- 
 200,000, Ohio had grown from nothing to 
 almost 1,000,000, Pennsylvania to 1,350,000 
 and New York State to 2,000,000. This was 
 due almost entirely to the neglect of canal and 
 road building by Virginia and the other South- 
 ern States, while these Northern States were 
 so busily engaged in their construction. 
 
 The backwoodsmen of Tennessee and Ken- 
 tucky had almost no trade except the small 
 barter among themselves. All the articles of 
 merchandise that came to those regions were 
 transported in wagons from Baltimore and 
 Philadelphia over bad roads and across the 
 mountains. The arrival of one of these store 
 wagons was sure to excite interest — ^the settlers 
 from far and near gathered around eagerly — 
 inquiring if the trader had brought out this, or 
 that article, and what was the price, and these 
 were enormous. A dollar a yard being fre- 
 quently charged for caUco that did not cost 
 
 74 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 over ten cents in Baltimore or Philadelphia. 
 
 It is difficult at the present time to realize 
 the difficulties under which these States labored 
 from the period of their first settlement down 
 to the cession of Louisiana in 1803, With a 
 soil and climate admirably adapted to the pro- 
 duction of the most valuable agricultural 
 staples of the country, it was useless for the 
 people to cultivate their rich soil beyond what 
 was needful for their own consumption. There 
 was no market for any surplus — no possible 
 price at which any hind of produce might be 
 sold that would pay the expense of transporta- 
 tion to Baltimore^ the nearest Eastern market 
 by a land carriage of many hundred miles over 
 mountains and on roads that were often hardly 
 passable with empty wagons. 
 
 The Mississippi, the natural channel of com- 
 merce for the entire West, was closed. The 
 banks of that river on both sides for several 
 himdred miles, including the port of New Or- 
 leans, were in the possession of Spain, whose 
 avowed policy was to cut off the Western 
 people from the navigation of that river. The 
 only two articles produced in Tennessee and 
 Kentucky, at this time, that justified the ex- 
 
 76 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 pense of land carriage to the Eastern States, 
 were saltpetre, which was found in abundance 
 in the mountain caves, and ginseng, the root 
 which even then was in such demand in China 
 that it could be transported overland to the 
 coast and there exported to China at a profit. 
 
 The genius of out American people in mat- 
 ters of transportation was early recognized. 
 Murray, an English authority, in 1829, stated 
 that: "Commerce is a branch for which the 
 American people have shown a peculiar apti- 
 tude, and they have pursued it with extraor- 
 dinary briskness and enterprise. American 
 vessels," says he, "are seen along the coasts of 
 all the three continents and they have rivalled 
 or supplanted the great European Powers, 
 even in the distant markets of China. They 
 hesitate not in little barks of sixty or seventy 
 tons to cross the Pacific. The bold spirit of a 
 Republican Government prompts natm-ally to 
 mercantile enterprises, and obliged by their 
 situation to obtain all the luxuries of life and 
 all the finer manufactures from across extensive 
 oceans, they were led easily into the path of 
 maritime adventure. The carrying trade which 
 properly belongs to a much more advanced 
 
 76 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 stage of national progress, has been thrown into 
 their hands by the general wars of Europe and 
 has rendered theirs almost the only neutral flag 
 that was to be seen on the European Seas." 
 
 In the year 1817 the whole commerce from 
 New Orleans to the upper river country was 
 carried on in about twenty barks, averaging a 
 hundred tons each, and making but one trip in 
 the year. On the upper Ohio there were one 
 hundred and fifty keel boats of about thirty 
 tons each which made the voyage from Pitts- 
 burgh to Louisville and back in two months, or 
 about three round trips per year. In 1842 
 Congressman Giddings called the attention of 
 Congress to the fact that : "The State of Ohio 
 alone that year built and launched on Lake 
 Erie and the Ohio River vessels with a larger 
 aggregate tonnage than all the Southern States 
 combined with Missouri and Arkansas besides." 
 
 But the Southern element in Congress was 
 not only indifferent to the development of 
 transportation in their own States, but was in- 
 different to the plea of the Northern States for 
 Congressional aid therefor. 
 
 The Southern States with slave labor that 
 cost Uttle, had no object in relieving that labor 
 
 77 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 of its burden, so they built not only few canals, 
 but few roads, while the free labor of the North, 
 seeking to get the most that it could for its 
 labor, concentrated its efforts upon relieving 
 itself from the burdens of transportation. At 
 the outbreak of the Civil War there were more 
 miles of railroad in a single Northern State 
 than there were in all the South. The North- 
 em armies could be transported from Vicks- 
 burg to Washington easier than a Southern 
 brigade could be moved from Birmingham to 
 Chattanooga, and the trimnph of the North 
 was due, more than to any other one cause, to 
 the superior transportation facilities possessed 
 by the North and their control of the iron with 
 which they built additional railways while the 
 war was in progress. 
 
 The slave labor of the South cost nothing 
 and so the Southerners did not feel the neces- 
 sity of being relieved of the burden of primi- 
 tive transportation, as did the free labor of the 
 North. Legal Emancipation has been of small 
 value, for intellectual and spiritual emancipa- 
 tion can be achieved only after physical eman- 
 cipation has become an accomplished fact. 
 
 Ohio continued to grow, and although its 
 
 78 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 Eastern boundary barely lapped Virginia's 
 western, it had by 1859 reached a population 
 of 2,000,000 against Virginia's 1,400,000. 
 
 In 1825 and 1826 some experiments had 
 been made in a new method of transportation, 
 and in the 30's and 40's a nvraiber of short lines 
 of railroad were built, not as competitors with 
 the canals and rivers, but as feeders to them. 
 The Portage Railway was the first operated 
 in America, but by 1850 it began to be seen 
 that railroads as a means of transportation 
 were destined to supercede canals. 
 
 In England, from the end of the Roman 
 occupancy until the middle of the Eighteenth 
 Century, practically no attention was paid to 
 road building. After the lapse of fourteen 
 centuries what was left of the Roman roads 
 were still the best roads in England. In 1745 
 the lack of roads so embarrassed the govern- 
 ment in its attempt to mobilize an army to 
 meet the Pretender's Raid that the need of 
 roads as a military necessity was impressed 
 upon the British Government. Between 1760 
 and 1775 nearly five hundred Acts were 
 passed by the British Parliament for the con- 
 struction and improvement of roads. 
 
 79 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 The closing decades of the Eighteenth Cen- 
 tury were of the pack horse period, when coal 
 was first carried about England from the 
 mines at a cost of two shillings, or fifty cents, 
 for a pack load. The Duke of Bridgewater 
 built a canal with which to get his doal to 
 Manchester, with the result that the cheapened 
 rate for transportation started a boom, not 
 only in the coal business, but in the canal busi- 
 ness. Owners of pack animals thought that 
 ruin stared them in the face; tiu^pike trus- 
 tees declared that "There was not enough traf- 
 fic for both land and water carriage," and 
 when, in 1785, the McAdam roads enabled 
 stage coaches to make a speed of eight or nine 
 miles an hour, the Quarterly Review declared 
 that: "The new method of road building 
 would seal the doom of the canal." Yet in 
 1847 it was stated that there was no spot in 
 England south of Durham that was over fif- 
 teen miles distant of navigable water and that 
 over the most of the country the maximum 
 distance from navigable water was actually 
 less than ten miles. 
 
 In 1776 when our American Revolution 
 broke out there was just one stage coach run- 
 so 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 ning between London and all Scotland, and 
 this coach, startmg from Edinburg, made one 
 round trip per month, taking six or seven days 
 to make the four hmidred mile trip in each 
 direction — flaying over a week at each end for 
 repairs to the coach and to give the teams rest 
 for the return trip. 
 
 In 1801 the Stirrey Iron Railway Company 
 was organized and received a charter for a 
 small line to be operated by horses. The 
 wagons used ran on four wheels from two to 
 three feet in diameter and carried f rtim twenty 
 to fifty hundredweight. On the dead level a 
 single horse pulled five loaded wagons, each 
 containing thirty hundredweight of coal at the 
 rate of four miles an hour — in all seven tons 
 exclusive of the wagons, which weighed three 
 tons more. 
 
 In 1803 an English engineer operated a 
 self-propelled steam wagon over a dounjtry 
 road, and the following year he successfully 
 operated his steam wagon over a short strip 
 of railway. It was not until the 10th of Octo- 
 ber, 1825, when the first railway train, hauled 
 by a steam locomotive, ran over the Stockton 
 and Darlington Railway, that railway service, 
 
 81 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 as we understand it, truly began. 
 
 In an article in the "Scotchman" in 1825, an 
 argument appeared in favor of railroads, in 
 which it was stated that: "No single thing 
 is so essential to the improvement of a country 
 as sustained and easy means of internal com- 
 mtinication. A large part of the price of 
 commodities always consists of the expense of 
 bringing them from the place where they are 
 made, or raised, to the market. In improved 
 districts this amoimts only to a small per- 
 centage upon the first cost, but in rude or 
 backward districts, unimproved with tolerable 
 roads, it even enhances the ctost of an article 
 to three or four or even ten times the original 
 cost, and, of course, either greatly lessens or 
 entirely precludes their use. Coal, for in- 
 stance, is not found within one hundred miles 
 of London, and, before the construction of 
 canals, covdd be sent cheaper from Gloucester- 
 shire by sea to Jamaica, than it could be sent 
 by land in carts to London. In those days 
 coal cost in London six pounds per ton ($30) , 
 a price which was nearly equivalent to a pro- 
 hibition against the use of this kind of fuel. 
 After the development of the canals, the cost 
 
 82 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 of coal dropped to forty shillings (or about 
 $10 a ton) . In early days the roads were mere 
 footpaths and goods were universally carried 
 on the backs of horses, to these succeeded gravel 
 roads for wheel carriages, and the latter were 
 followed by canals. A horse put in a wheel 
 carriage will draw upon a well-made road as 
 much as four horses will carry on their backs, 
 but when employed in working a boat on a 
 canal he will perform as much work as thirty 
 horses in carriages, or as t>ne hundred and 
 twenty pack horses. Railways are a much 
 more recent invention than canals, and for 
 peculiar purposes, such as conveyance of coal, 
 stone, or other heavy commodities, they are 
 decidedly superior. As a means of general 
 communication they are cheaper in the first 
 outlay than canals, and adapted to a greater 
 variety of situations, but so long as horsepower 
 has been the only power employed it may be 
 doubted whether the balance of advantage is 
 not in favor of canals. We are satisfied, how- 
 ever, that the introduction of the locomotive 
 (steam power) has given a decided superiority 
 to railways, and we hope, by and by, to convey 
 some share of this conviction to the minds of 
 
 83 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 our readers. The general use of railways and 
 steam carriages for all kinds of internal com- 
 munication offers prospects of almost bound- 
 less improvement, and is destined, perhaps, to 
 work a greater change on the state of civil so- 
 ciety than even the grand discovery of navi- 
 gation." 
 
 On October 6th, 1829, the Liverpool and 
 Manchester Railway held the first real test to 
 decide upon the motive power of their future 
 operation, and selected George Stevenson's lo- 
 comotive, "The Rocket," which in the test had 
 attained a speed of twenty-nine miles an hour. 
 The Liverpool and Manchester Railway line 
 was opened early the fbllowing year, and dur- 
 ing this first year carried over 500,000 passen- 
 gers. It must not, however, be supposed that 
 the success of this line, by any means satisfied 
 the public. The new system of transportation 
 was attacked by eminent engineers, and by Pro 
 Bono Publico in the public press; pamphlets 
 were published in which it was solemnly de- 
 clared that: "The noise of the railways would 
 stop hens from laying and prevent cattle from 
 grazing; that the poisoned smoke from the lo- 
 comotives would kill song birds and game, and 
 
 84 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 that all houses anywhere near the railways 
 would be set on fire by the engines." It was 
 urged that boilers would burst and blow the 
 passengers to bits. 
 
 The Conversative Quarterly declared: "As 
 to those persons who speculated on making 
 railways general throughout the kingdom, — 
 we deem them and their visionary schemes un- 
 worthy of notice," and further, in discussing 
 a proposed railway between London and 
 Woolwich, whereby it was proposed to shorten 
 the time by stage coach one-half, the Review 
 declared: "We shbuld as soon expect the peo- 
 ple of Woolwich to suffer themselves to be 
 fired off upon one of Congreave's Rockets as 
 to trust themselves to the mercy of such a ma- 
 chine going at such a rate." 
 
 But notwithstanding such warnings, the 
 people turned to the new method of transpor- 
 tation.. In 1833 charters were issued for the 
 construction of lines from London to Birming- 
 ham and from London to Greenwich. In 1834 
 a charter was granted for the construction of 
 a line from London to Southampton. In 1835 
 a charter was issued for the construction of the 
 Great Western Railway. In 1836 for the 
 
 86 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 London and Great Eastern, and in 1837, for 
 the London and Brighton. The panic in 1837 
 and 1838 put a stop to railway construction, 
 but by 1840 the railways already completed 
 began to pay handsome dividends and it be- 
 came apparent that the new method of trans- 
 portation was no longer an experiment but a 
 financial success and was destined to revolu- 
 tionize travel and commerce. 
 
 Let us turn f rtom England to our own coun- 
 try again. 
 
 The Boston Post Road from New York fol- 
 lowed an Indian trail, that ran through pioneer 
 settlement to pioneer settlement. It did not 
 begin to be a thoroughfare until Governor 
 Lovelace, of New York, established the first 
 mail service between New York and Boston. 
 He wrote a letter to Governor Winthrop of 
 Massachusetts, telling him of his plan, and the 
 aid that it ought to be in promoting friendly 
 relations among the English Colonies. The 
 first post rider left New York on his two hun- 
 dred and fifty mile trip on January 22d, 1673, 
 taking two weeks to reach Boston. He started 
 on his retvim to New York at once, making 
 the round trip within a month. For miles of 
 
 86 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 the way there was absolutely no real road at 
 all, nothing but the Indian trails through the 
 forests. 
 
 In 1782 the first through coach service be- 
 tween Boston and New York was inaugurated. 
 The journey occupying six days — the coach 
 starting out early Monday morning and arriv- 
 ing at the other end of the line Saturday eve- 
 ning. 
 
 With the bettering of the roads that the 
 stage coaches used the traveling of the post 
 riders was accelerated, and it may surprise you 
 to learn that Thomas Jefferson was something 
 of a speed fiend himself. In 1792, while he 
 was Secretary of State, he called attention to 
 the fact that the post riders between Boston 
 and New York were making only from thirty 
 to fifty miles a day, and he believed that with 
 relays of horses and men it "was possible to 
 travel one hundred miles a day, and to send 
 letters frt)m New York to Boston in two days 
 and a half. The experiment was tried and 
 found successful, so much so that the same ex- 
 periment was tried with the coach traffic, and 
 resulted in cutting down the time between 
 Boston and New York to three days. Between 
 
 87 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 1815 and 1820 considerable work was done in 
 cutting out the curves and straightening the 
 road, so that by 1821 a stage coach service was 
 inaugurated over a new road that cut the dis- 
 tance f Horn two hundred and fifty miles to two 
 hundred and ten miles, and with the invention 
 of the Concord coach, which with its swinging 
 body was the acme of comfort for coach trav- 
 eUng, the time was cut down to two days. 
 
 But out in western Pennsylvania, Ohio and 
 Indiana, the frontier conditions reduced the 
 pioneers to the same old conditions of travel. 
 
 Senator Reynolds of Illinois said : "We left 
 Knoxville with eight horses aind two wagons 
 for New Spain. Oiu" company consisted of 
 my parents, six children, three hired men and 
 a colored woman. Our clothing, beds and some 
 farming utensils, with our provisions, made the 
 light freight for the two wagons, which was 
 fortunate, as heavy biu-dens would have been 
 a great injury to us. At the Ohio River our 
 three hired men, who had been engaged to 
 work for a year, abandoned us, taking with 
 them three of our horses, and left us desolate 
 in this wilderness filled with savages and wild 
 beasts, extending on the north to the Pole it- 
 
 88 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 self and on the west to China, except a few 
 straggling settlements on the Wabash and 
 Mississippi Rivers. The west side of the Ohio 
 River was then called the Indian Country, but 
 after making necessary arrangements at 
 Lusk's Ferry, we ci^ossed the Ohio. I recol- 
 lect asking Mr, Lusk how far it was to the 
 nearest town. He laughed and isaid, 'One 
 hundred and ten miles to Kaskaskia.' We trav- 
 eled on west, rafted four creeks and traveled 
 around the head of another. In rafting the 
 streams we took the wagons ito pieces and 
 crossed them in parcels. The horses swam over 
 but were at times troubled to get up the per- 
 pendicular banks 'of the stream. We were four 
 weeks traveling the journey from the Ohio 
 River to Kaskaskia, one hundred and ten miles, 
 and experienced much hardship and difficulty 
 on the road. Arriving at Kaskaskia we were 
 the seventh family there." 
 
 Griffiths, an English traveler in 1820, said: 
 "With respect to markets for their products, 
 the farmers of Ohio disposed of a great deal 
 by bartering it away at stores in return for 
 articles of dress, furniture, etc. Beef and mut- 
 ton, which they raised themselves and which 
 
 89 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 they could not export, sold for from three to 
 four cents a pound. Pork, for which a shght 
 export market could be found in the shape of 
 hams and lard, brought six cents a pound, while 
 sugar, which had to be brought in by the then 
 laborious methods of transportation, cost 
 twelve cents a poimd. Potatoes which they 
 raised themselves were exchanged at the coun- 
 try store on the basis of twenty-five cents per 
 bushel. Butter for twelve and one-half cents 
 per pound." 
 
 He further says: "A stout, active man in 
 those western doimtries in those days received 
 fifty cents a day and his board for wages; not 
 often in cash, but what to the emigrant was as 
 good as cash, namely, supplies which he was 
 able to obtain at the store on his employer's 
 account, or in pork, flour or potatoes, which he 
 secured from his employer direct." 
 
 Birbeck, describing the traffic between Phila- 
 delphia and Pittsburgh, in fl817, says that 
 "Twelve thousand wagons passed that year be- 
 tween Baltimore and Philadelphia and Pitts- 
 burgh, to which should be added numerous 
 stage coaches loaded to the limit and innumer- 
 able travelers on horseback, on foot and in 
 
 90 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 light wagons, and you have a scene of bustle 
 and business extending over the three hundred 
 miles of road that is truly marvelous. The 
 freight so handled over the road cost seven 
 doUars per hundred weight, or one hundred 
 and forty dollars a ton." 
 
 Today the transportation between these 
 points over the Pennsylvania Railroad costs 
 about one dollar and fifty cents per ton, or 
 one one-hundredth of what it did then. 
 
 Birbeck noted further that: "There was 
 manufactured at Pittsburgh at this time a very 
 fine quality of glass, but that the roads to 
 Philadelphia and New York were in such con- 
 dition that it was impossible to transport with- 
 out breakage, so that our eastern ports were 
 still compelled to buy their window panes in 
 Holland, from which large quantities were im- 
 ported annually." 
 
 The Chamber of Commerce of Cincinnati in 
 1847 asked Congress to assist in removing the 
 obstructions from our great western highways. 
 It declared: "A population of 7,000,000 has 
 been planted in the Mississippi Valley and 
 the commerce now afloat on the Mississippi 
 River, and its branches, is greater in value than 
 
 91 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 that which crosses the Atlantic Ocean. We 
 represent," they said, "not merely the wants 
 and interests of eleven states and two terri- 
 tories, but of the American people, and we 
 invite the nation to join us in creating a great 
 central chain of national intercommunication, 
 having its connection with the ocean and ex- 
 tending its advantages westwardly throughout 
 the wilderness to the extreme frontier. 
 
 "Those who purchase our products are in- 
 terested in every tax upon our industry and 
 those who supply us with foreign merchandise, 
 or manufactured articles, are concerned in all 
 the facilities for transportation by which their 
 market is rendered accessible. Whatever af- 
 fects the cost of freight cov^errvs all mutually 
 who participate in the exchange of commodi- 
 ties. Every tax upon the products of the coun- 
 try must be paid either by the producer or the 
 consumer, or it must he divided between them, 
 and whatever adds to the cost of our imports, 
 it is so much taken in some shape from the 
 pockets of the seller or of the buyer, and all 
 that is thus taken is so much wrested from the 
 hand of industry and enterprise." 
 
 In 1832, when the only railroad in Ohio was 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 the one from Cleveland to Cincinnati, and 
 traffic with the east was either by river from 
 Cincinnati to Pittsburgh and from Pittsburgh 
 to Philadelphia or New York by rail, or from 
 Cleveland to Oswego by lake and by canal 
 from there to New York, the farmers in Ohio 
 got only fifty cents a bushel for their wheat. 
 It cost ten cents a bushel from any point on 
 the railroad to Cleveland and twenty to twenty- 
 five cents per bushel from Cleveland to New 
 York by canal, so that wheat that cost fifty 
 cents a bushel at the railroad station in Ohio, 
 cost eighty-five cents per bushel in New York, 
 and it cost forty cents a bushel more to trans- 
 port it from New York or Philadelphia, to Liv- 
 erpool, 
 
 In other words, the cost of transporting 
 wheat from Ohio to Liverpool was one and one- 
 half times the value of the wheat in Ohio. 
 
 In those days it took sixteen days to travel 
 from Cleveland to New York via the lake and 
 the canal. A friend of mine, Mr. Hoberg, 
 made the trip in that year (1852) from New 
 York to Terre Haute, Indiana, traveling by 
 river from New York to Troy, by canal from 
 Troy to Buffalo, by lake from Buffalo to To- 
 
 93 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 ledo, from Toledo to Lafayette, Indiana, and 
 from Lafayette to Terra Haute, via the Wa- 
 bash and Erie Canal, taking six weeks for the 
 trip. 
 
 The farm labor in Ohio and Indiana in the 
 fifties was paid fifty cents a day and boarded 
 themselves, except during harvest time, when 
 wages were fifty cents a day and board. At 
 this time Pittsburgh was the western terminus 
 of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and a Pitts- 
 burgh manufacturer complained that their 
 markets and prosperity were threatened by the 
 high price of labor, whidi by reason of the rail- 
 roads has risen to seventy-five cents and one 
 doUar a day. Also, because the price of coal 
 had recently risen as a result of a strike among 
 the coal miners, who had been getting a dollar 
 a day, and who had struck for and secured a 
 raise to one dollar and a quarter a day. 
 
 "But," he adds, "commerce has come, bring- 
 ing with it a market for the products of the 
 pioneer farmers. The forests have been pene- 
 trated by roads, bridges thrown over the rivers 
 and highways constructed throughout the wil- 
 derness. Traveling," he says, "has been ren- 
 dered easy and transportation cheap. While 
 
 94, 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 in every village is seen the smoke of the manu- 
 factory and is heard the cheerful soxmds of the 
 engine and the hammer." This same observer 
 reports that in Pennsylvania along the line of 
 the railroad, labor commanded a dollar a day 
 and had actually risen to a dollar and a half 
 during the past harvest. 
 
 The Western States generally realized how 
 much New York owed its development to the 
 building of the Erie Canal, and DeWitt Clin- 
 ton, who had been the sponsor for the construc- 
 tion of the Erie Canal, was a State hero. In 
 1837 Lincoln, then a member of the Illinois 
 Legislature, urged the construction of a canal 
 across the State of Illinois to the Mississippi, 
 calling attention to what the Erie Canal had 
 done for New York, and declared his intention 
 of being the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois. 
 
 Senator Reynolds of Illinois declared that: 
 "In the year 1836 the fever for internal im- 
 provement raged throughout most of the states 
 of the Union. Pennsylvania," he says, "was 
 crazy to improve the whole country whether 
 the wants of the people required it or not. In- 
 diana was almost as wild, and Illinois was con- 
 siderably crazed with the mania." 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 In 1836 Senator Reynolds, with some asso- 
 ciates, built a short railroad six miles long from 
 some coal property to the Mississippi River in 
 order to supply coal to St. Louis. And even 
 in those times, the engineers exhibited their 
 usual failing, for the Senator records that: 
 "Although the road was short, the engineers 
 made an erroneous calculation of the cost, mak- 
 ing their estimate less than half of the real 
 cost." The members of the company overlooked 
 the work themselves, employing for a while 
 over one hundred hands a day. They built 
 shanties in which to board the hands, procured 
 provisions and lodging for them, graded the 
 track, cut and hauled timber, built a pile trestle 
 eighty feet high, two thousand feet over a lake, 
 built the road and had it running in one season, 
 in 1837. The promoters had not the means nor 
 the time to procure from the East iron for the 
 rails or a locomotive, so they were compelled to 
 work this short piece of railroad with wooden 
 rails and horse power. It was the first rail- 
 road built in the Mississippi Valley, and, as the 
 Senator himself later asserted, it was the great- 
 est work or enterprise ever performed in Illi- 
 nois under such circvraistances, and it brought 
 
 96 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 to the promoters the usual reward of such en- 
 terprise, for the Senator records the fact: "It 
 well-nigh broke us all!" But in 1855, at the 
 end of his long and wonderful career. Governor 
 (then Senator) Reynolds, said: "The railroad 
 system has advanced our nation at least half a 
 century, time and distance are almost annihi- 
 lated." 
 
 Railroad Development in the United 
 States. 
 
 There was no doubt in the minds of the 
 American people, at that time, as to what they 
 owed their prosperity and their success. To 
 this new problem of transportation, the whole 
 genius of our people directed itself. Not only 
 individuals, but municipalities and states, 
 joined in the work. Even the National Gov- 
 ernment recognized the fact that its great pub- 
 lic domain, however valuable in its potentiali- 
 ties, was not only valueless but a burden so long 
 as it remained inaccessible. 
 
 The traffic beyond the Mississippi before the 
 end of the Civil War was chiefly by wagon 
 train, which started westward from some river 
 point hke Atchison or St. Joe. A wagon train 
 
 97 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 in the old days consisted of twenty-six wagons, 
 with four yoke of oxen to each wagon. There 
 were usually fifty well-armed men with each 
 train, and, while there were many Indians, it 
 was only the small outfits that usually suffered. 
 The ox trains only traveled about fourteen 
 miles a day, and three months were required 
 for a round trip from Atchison to Denver. 
 Three trips were made a year by each train, 
 the stock being allowed to rest during the worst 
 three months of the year. Twenty-five of the 
 wagons in a train would be loaded with freight ; 
 the twenty-sixth wagon carried supplies for 
 the teamsters and men en route. 
 
 The drivers of ox teams received thirty-five 
 dollars a month and board, the drivers of mule 
 teams from five to ten dollars more. An ox 
 wagon carried from six to eight thousand 
 pounds of freight, and the prices paid were 
 such that the average wagon earned four hun- 
 dred dollars per trip. Mule teams made the 
 round trip from Atchison to Denver in forty 
 days, and the price for carrying freight ranged 
 from twelve to sixteen cents per pound, or fifty 
 cents per ton-mile. In the winter the owners 
 of mule teams received twenty-five cents a 
 
 98 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 pound for freight to Denver. It was no un- 
 common sight to see four or five steamboats 
 lying at the Atchison levee at one time. There 
 was a regular line of packets between St. Louis 
 and St. Joe, the average roimd trip occupying 
 eight days. Coming up the river, the boats 
 ran all night, but in going down they laid up as 
 soon as darkness set in. The boats carried from 
 two hundred to four hundred passengers on the 
 trip, counting immigrants on the deck. The 
 cabin fare from St. Louis to St. Joe ranged 
 from ten to fifteen dollars. The average boat 
 carried five hundred or six hundred tons of 
 freight, and freight that now costs twenty cents 
 a hundred cost then two dollars and fifty cents 
 per himdred. 
 
 The first Colorado gold ores that came out, 
 came by mule team to Atchison, where it was 
 put into six hundred old coal oil barrels, and 
 in these were sent by boat down the river to 
 New Orleans and there transferred to ocean- 
 going vessels for shipment to Swansea, Wales, 
 for smelting. As the mule teams went west 
 loaded and came back empty, this ore was 
 hauled from Central City, Colorado, to Atchi- 
 son, in consideration that it was down grade 
 
 99 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 most of the way, for the exceedingly low price 
 of two cents a pound. One of these wagon 
 trains carrying flour, arrived in Denver during 
 the famine, when supplies had run low, and 
 the shippers made a small fortune selling their 
 flour that had arrived so opportimely for twen 
 ty-flve dollars a hundred pounds. 
 
 In 1864, 6,000,000 pounds were transported 
 west from Atchison by these ox or mule teams, 
 while in 1865, after the close of the war, this 
 transport jumped to 17,000,000 pounds and 
 two thousand new wagons were put into the 
 business. One of these wagon trains, going 
 through to Virginia City, arrived there and 
 presented a freight bill for their twenty-six 
 wagon loads, amounting to over forty thousand 
 dollars. The merchants there being unable to 
 pay, the wagon owners were compelled to open 
 stores themselves and sell the goods in order to 
 pay their charge for transportation. 
 
 In the day of pack trains, before the estab- 
 lishment of regular freight caravans from the 
 Missouri River westward, it was no uncommon 
 thing to pay a freight charge of one dollar per 
 pound per hundred miles, or twenty dollars per 
 ton per mile. There were special rates much 
 
 100 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 higher even than this, but this was the regular 
 tariff. This tariff, by the way, continues down 
 to the present time, in those remote districts 
 of our Western States where the pack animal is 
 still used to reach small communities and min- 
 ing camps distant from the railroads. 
 
 The demand for fast service following the 
 discovery of gold in California led to the estab- 
 lishment of the "pony express," which by the 
 establishment of stations one himdred miles 
 apart from Independence, Missouri, to San 
 Francisco, and the employment of one himdred 
 riders and five hundred of the fastest horses 
 that could be found, succeeded in carrying mail 
 from Independence to San Francisco in ten to 
 eleven days at a cost of five dollars per half- 
 ounce. 
 
 Before the installation of the "pony express" 
 the fastest time between New York and San 
 Francisco was twenty-three days. 
 
 In 1861 when the railroad trains ran to St. 
 Joe, Missouri, the news of Lincoln's election 
 reached Denver (625 miles away) in three 
 days, and news of Lincoln's inaugural was car- 
 ried from St. Joe to San Francisco in seven 
 days and seventeen hours, which to this day re- 
 
 101 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 mains a record for such transportation over 
 such distances. 
 
 Some idea of the cost of such method of 
 travel may be gathered from the following 
 fares charged by the stage coach line. The fare 
 from Atchison to Denver (620 miles) was $175 
 (meals extra) . It had formerly been as high 
 as $350. In the early days when the rush for 
 California was at its height $600 was charged 
 for a seat in a stage coach from Atchison to 
 Placerville, but naturally these prices brought 
 forth a great increase in the number of coaches 
 and the traffic, so that by 1863 Halliday's coadi 
 line advertised the fare from Atchison to 
 Placerville at $225, meals extra. 
 
 In 1865 Schuyler Colfax, then a member of 
 Congress from Indiana, with Samuel Boles, of 
 the Springfield (Mass.) "Republican," made 
 the trip from Atchison to Denver in four and 
 one-half days, and from Salt Lake City to Vir- 
 ginia City (Nevada) , 575 miles, in seventy-two 
 hours. The seventy mile stretch from the Sum- 
 mit to Placerville, California, was made in 
 seven hours. 
 
 The Government determined to open up its 
 great public domain and make it valuable by 
 
 lOS 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 making it accessible. And embarked upon a 
 career of building railroads so colossal that it 
 seems impossible that the original promoters 
 of this work can have anticipated the result. 
 
 The growth by decades is shown by the fol- 
 lowing table: 
 
 
 
 Miles 
 
 Internal 
 
 
 Population 
 
 of road 
 
 Commerce 
 
 Wealth. 
 
 1850... 
 
 . 23,191,876 
 
 9,021 
 
 $2,000,000,000 
 
 $7,135,780,000 
 
 1860. . 
 
 . 31,443,321 
 
 20,626 
 
 3,500,000,000 
 
 16,159,616,068 
 
 1870... 
 
 . 38,SS8,371 
 
 52,922 
 
 6,250,000,000 
 
 30,068,518,507 
 
 1880.. 
 
 . 50,155,783 
 
 93,262 
 
 7,750,000,000 
 
 43,642,000,000 
 
 1890.. 
 
 . 62,622,250 
 
 166,703 
 
 12,000,000,000 
 
 65,037,091,197 
 
 1900. . 
 
 . 76,303,387 
 
 193,345 
 
 18,000,000,000 
 
 94,300,000,000 
 
 1910, . . 
 
 . 91,900,000 
 
 240,000 
 
 30,000,000,000 
 
 130,000,000,000 
 
 From this table it will be seen that in 1850, 
 when the population of the United States was 
 already more than 23,000,000 and the coimtry 
 was dependent almost entirely upon canals, 
 rivers and steamboats, having only nine thou- 
 sand miles of railroad in the entire country, the 
 national commerce of the United States 
 amounted to only $2,000,000,000 per annum, 
 while the total wealth of the country amounted 
 to only a little more than $7,000,000,000, or 
 about $300 per capita. 
 
 In the sixty years that have elapsed from 
 
 103 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 that time down to 1910, the railroad mileage 
 of the United States, through our genius for 
 transportation, has grown from 9,000 to 240,- 
 000 miles — ^more than twenty-six times what it 
 was sixty years ago. During this same period 
 our population has increased from 23,000,000 
 to 92,000,000, or only about four times. 
 
 But our four times as many people have been 
 so well served by our twenty-six times as many 
 miles of railroad that our internal commerce 
 has grown from $2,000,000,000 to $30,000,000,- 
 000, or fifteen times as much. While our wealth 
 has increased from' $7,000,000,000 to $130,000,- 
 000,000, or eighteen and one-half times as 
 much, until now our national wealth is $1,400 
 per capita. 
 
 The effect of this railroad development upon 
 manufactures is shown in the State of Ohio 
 which in 1850 already had a population of near- 
 ly 2,000,000, and was reaUy better served by 
 its rivers and canals than any other interior 
 state, yet the total values of its manufactures 
 in 1850 was only $62,000,000. But, with the 
 development of railroads in the State, and from 
 the State eastward to the coast, manufactured 
 products of the State grew rapidly in value, 
 
 104 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 amounting to $121,000,000, in 1860; $269,000,- 
 000, in 1870; $348,000,000, in 1880; $500,000,- 
 000, in 1890; $605,000,000, in 1900, and $1,- 
 200,000,000, in 1910. Or, in other words, while 
 the population of the State of Ohio has grown 
 from 1,980,000 in 1850 to 4,767,000 in 1910, or 
 an increase of only one hundred and forty per 
 cent., the products of the labor, of her inhabi- 
 tants has increased 1,900 per cent., or fourteen 
 times as fast. 
 
 It is apparent from this that of two equal 
 populations, one of which has better transporta- 
 tion facilities than the other, that population 
 having the better transportation f acihties will 
 surpass the other population in commerce and 
 wealth in a degree that bears a definite propor- 
 tion to its excellence in transportation. 
 
 It is a fact, though we seldom stop to recall 
 it, that the price of a finished product in the 
 market of the world, is made up of the cost of 
 manufacture plus the cost of transportation. 
 Reduced to its lowest terms, the cost of every 
 manufactured product is simply the cost of the 
 .labor to produce it. For the cost of the so- 
 called "raw material" is simply the cost of the 
 labor to produce it, whether it be digging the 
 
 105 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 ores from the mines, gathering the ivory in the 
 forests of Africa, hides on the plains of Argen- 
 tina, or shearing wool from the backs of sheep. 
 Under primitive conditions transportation 
 itself is simply labor, and the cost of transpor- 
 , tation is simply the cost of the human labor nec- 
 yessary to carry the finished product to market, 
 and you have seen how the race has labored and 
 striven from the beginning of time to relieve 
 itself from the burden of transporting its prod- 
 uct by the costly and laborious methods that 
 still more or less prevail. 
 
 And you have seen how by the development 
 of modern means of transportation, of the 
 canal, of the steamboat, of the railroad, that 
 labor has been more and more relieved of its 
 burden of transportation. But it is hard for 
 you who are familiar only with modern means 
 and methods of transportation to realize how 
 much you owe to the introduction of these 
 modem methods. 
 
 The value of every commodity depends upon 
 the breadth of the market for it, and particular- 
 ly is this true of the value of labor. For labor 
 necessarily depends for its value on the facili- 
 ties which exist for transporting its products to 
 
 106 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 market. Thus in China where the f acihties for 
 transportation are poorest and most primitive, 
 we find the cheapest lahor. Cheap, because it is 
 confined for a market for its product to itself — 
 thus literally" eating itself up — because it is cut 
 off from the markets of the world by the high 
 cost of reaching them. 
 
 It is interesting at this point to notice the 
 proportion in which the leading nations of the 
 world have taken advantage of these means of 
 transportation. 
 
 Miles of Miles 
 
 Population Railroad per 10,000 
 
 Great Britain 45,316,000 33,380 5.14 
 
 France 38,961,000 34,915 6.38 
 
 Germany 64,900,000 36,335 5.58 
 
 Austria 33,475,000 10,000 3.08 
 
 Russia 160,000,000 35,347 3.31 
 
 United States 91,900,000 340,000 36.1 1 
 
 These Figures Are for 1910 
 
 It wiU be seen from this table that the aver- 
 age man in America is more than four times 
 better served with railroad facilities than the 
 average Frenchman, who, next to ourselves, are 
 the best served by their railroads of any people 
 in the world. While the average American is 
 five times better served in this respect than is 
 
 107 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 the average inhabitant of Great Britain or Ger- 
 many, who are our chief industrial rivals. 
 
 From this it is easy to see how much greater 
 is the opportunity of the average American to 
 market the products of his labor, and how mudi 
 wider is the market which these products may 
 reach. For you must take notice of the fact 
 that markets increase in proportion to the 
 square of the radius of the transportation lines 
 that reach them and that labor's opportimity 
 widens in a like proportion. 
 
 Sir Josiah Child, the great merchant of Lon- 
 don, during the reign of Charles I, who was 
 the establisher of the East India Company, 
 stated, in 1633, that "The growth of commerce 
 in England had brought such wealth to Eng- 
 land that there was then ia London more mer- 
 chants worth one thousand pounds apiece than 
 in 1600 were worth one hundred pounds apiece. 
 As the result of this commerce," he declared, 
 "wages had risen one-third in twenty years, 
 rents had only increased one-fourth in the same 
 time, while land values had tripled." 
 
 I have in my office two receipted freight bills 
 covering the transportation of a bale of rugs 
 from Tsun Hua, China, to New York City. 
 
 108 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 The shipment from Tsun-Hua to Tien-Tsin, a 
 distance of ninety miles, was by camelback, and 
 occupied five days, for which I paid the sum of 
 $4.70. At Tien Tsin the rugs were placed on 
 board steamer, shipped to Shanghai, where they 
 were transferred to another steamer that 
 brought them from Shanghai to New York 
 City. The distance from Tien Tsin to New 
 York being about seventeen thousand miles and 
 the freight charge therefor, including the trans- 
 fer at Shanghai, amounted to $4.30. It cost 
 more by camelback for ninety miles imder 
 primitive conditions than it did by steamship 
 under modem conditions for seventeen thou- 
 sand miles, and the camel driver received only 
 ten cents a day wages. 
 
 But the cost of transportation is not alone 
 governed by the methods of transportation em- 
 ployed, but in civilized countries where prac- 
 tically the same methods of transportation pre- 
 vail, they are governed by skill in operation. 
 Nowhere else in the world has railroad opera- 
 tion been reduced to the science that it has in 
 this country, where our train loads average 
 three times those of Europe and our ton-mile 
 rates are not only the lowest, but are scarcely 
 
 109 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 one-third those of our nearest competitors. 
 
 At this point I wish to call your attention to 
 what American railroads have enabled us to do 
 for American labor : 
 
 Cost of Teansportation 
 
 Country Per Ton-Mile in Cents Wages per Day- 
 China $0.10 $0.10 
 
 Japan .05 .S3 
 
 Russia .023 .34 
 
 Italy .024 .26 
 
 Austria .0325 .50 
 
 Germany .0150 .90 
 
 France .0190 .80 
 
 England .0260 1.04 
 
 United States .0069 2.60 
 
 From this it wiU be seen that in China, where 
 the cost of transportation amounts to ten cents 
 per ton-mile, wages only average ten cents per 
 day. In Japan, which by reason of a small rail- 
 road system and fair means of water communi- 
 cation, has reduced its average cost of trans- 
 portation to five cents per ton mile, the wages 
 are about twenty-three cents per day. In Rus- 
 sia and Italy, which of civilized countries have 
 the lowest railroad mileage in proportion to 
 population and a high average cost per ton mile 
 for transportation, the average wage is only 
 
 110 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 thirty-four and twenty-six cents per day, re- 
 spectively. 
 
 In Germany, France and England, which 
 approximate each other in the average cost of 
 transportation per ton-mile and in their aver- 
 age mileage of railroad in proportion to their 
 population, there is a fair approximation of the 
 average wage. While in our own coimtry, 
 where we have the greatest railroad mileage in 
 proportion to our population, and the lowest 
 cost of transportation, we have the highest av- 
 erage wage to be found in the world; the high- 
 est wage, in fact, of which there is any record in 
 history. 
 
 These figures were prepared by me in 1902 
 and I have purposely left them the same be- 
 cause subsequent changes have proved the cor- 
 rectness of my deductions. The increase of 
 transportation facilities to and from Japan has 
 almost doubled, and there has been a very large 
 increase in the internal transportation facilities 
 by the construction of steam and electric rail- 
 roads, and wages in Japan have risen over forty 
 per cent, in the past ten years. A rise in Eng- 
 lish rates during this time has resulted in a fall 
 in English wages, while a reduction in German 
 
 111 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 rates has resulted in a rise in German wages, 
 until" now they are higher than the average 
 wage in England. 
 
 The industrial development of America, the 
 great demand for labor and the high wages that 
 exist in our country today are due almost alone 
 to our wonderful railroad development and to 
 the cheapness of our transportation rates. 
 
 Were the farmers of Kansas and Minnesota 
 compelled to pay such transportation charges 
 as the farmers in China, it would cost them 
 one hundred and fifty dollars a ton to ship 
 wheat from their farms to New York, or four 
 thousand five hundred dollars for a thii^-ton 
 car holding eleven hundred bushels. In other 
 words, their wheat worth only a dollar a bushel 
 on the farm would cost six dollars a bushel de- 
 livered at tidewater. 
 
 Were the steel mills of Pittsburgh com- 
 pelled to pay only as much as the manufac- 
 turer of Japan for the transportation of their 
 products to market, it would cost them twenty- 
 five dollars a ton to deliver steel rails on board 
 ship. Pittsburgh rails costing twenty-five dol- 
 lars a ton at the mill would cost fifty doUars 
 a ton in New York, while Chicago rails facing 
 
 112 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 a transportation charge of fifty dollars a ton 
 would have to be manufactured for nothing in 
 order to compete with Pittsburgh rails in the 
 Atlantic coast market. 
 
 It is easy to see that industrial development 
 in competition with conditions as we know 
 them in America, is impossible in a country 
 like China, where coal mined by cheap Chinese 
 labor at a cost of only twenty-five cents a ton 
 at the mouth of the mine is raised by the mere 
 cost of transportation to eight dollars per ton 
 when thansported a distance of less than forty 
 miles. Under such conditions the consumption 
 of coal is naturally limited to a small radius 
 around each mine, as it was in England, and it 
 is impossible to develop any mining industry. 
 
 Nowhere has the result of our transportation 
 system been better shown than in the develop- 
 ment of the coal and iron industry. In 1850 
 our coal production was only six million tons. 
 In 1912 it was five hundred and twenty-five 
 million tons. Nearly ninety times as large, 
 and twenty times as much per capita. It has 
 more than doubled in the past twelve years, 
 for it was only two hundred and forty mUhons 
 in 1900. In 1882 the total production of iron 
 
 lis 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 and steel in the United States was 4,600,000 
 tons; Great Britain's being almost twice as 
 large, amounting to 8,600,000 tons. 
 
 By 1890 we had passed England, producing 
 9,200,000 tons to Great Britain's 8,000,000. 
 By 1900 we were producing 13,789,000 to 
 England's 8,960,000, while in 1910 we pro- 
 duced 27,300,000 tons to England's 10,200,- 
 000 tons, or nearly three times as much as 
 Great Britain, whose production that year was 
 the highest it had ever been. 
 
 The miners of this country should recog- 
 nize the fact that were it not for the wonderful 
 cheap rates made by our American railroads for 
 the transportation of coal, that not one mine 
 in one hundred would be open today and that 
 most of them would be seeking employment, as 
 are the inhabitants of most other countries, at 
 wages averaging about one-fourth what they 
 are earning today. 
 
 To the development of the art of transpor- 
 tation is due two of the greatest boons that 
 have been brought to the hmnan race. Until 
 transportation made it possible to distribute 
 coal long distances from the mines, the race 
 gradually burned up its available wood sup- 
 
 114 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 ply and then piled on clothes and shivered 
 through its winters. The relief of civilized man 
 from the pain of cold has been due entirely to 
 the development of transportation. But most 
 important of all, the development of transpor- 
 tation has relieved mankind of the agony of 
 fear and superstition that came with physical 
 darkness; cheap transportation has put cheap 
 illuminants into the remotest corners of the 
 world. The introduction of Standard Oil into 
 Africa, into Arabia, into India, China and 
 Japan has done more in forty years to banish 
 not only physical darkness but mental and 
 spiritual darkness than all the missionary 
 forces could have accomplished in a thousand 
 years. Fear and ignorance and superstition 
 dwell in physical darkness and artificial light, 
 which banishes night, drives out fear and su- 
 perstition with it. The time will yet come 
 when John D. Rockefeller and his associates 
 will be recognized among the greatest bene- 
 factors that the human race has ever had. 
 
 In our country it is well known that as the 
 railroads have reached out into the new coun- 
 try, wages have steadily increased and the 
 price of farm products have steadily risen. 
 
 115 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 Wages have always been low in those parts 
 of the country far ahead of or removed from 
 railroad facilities, and today the lowest wageis 
 found in the United States are in those states 
 that have the poorest railroad facilities. When- 
 ever the railroads came into a new community 
 the wages almost immediately doubled. 
 
 Cost of Transpoktation Pee Ton-Mele 
 
 Year In Cents Wages per Day 
 
 1850 3.50 $1.33 
 
 1860 2.74 IJO 
 
 18T0 1.99 1.97 
 
 1880 1.26 2.13 
 
 1890 .92 S.SO 
 
 1900 69 2.60 
 
 1910 76 3.75 
 
 It will he seen that as our transportation 
 rates have steadily fallen, the wages of labor 
 have steadily risen, and that, too, in an almost 
 constant proportion. 
 
 In the last decade the slight rise in ton-mile 
 rates is due to the operation of the Hepburn 
 Law, which has also operated to slow down the 
 rise of wages. 
 
 In the last sixty years our railroad mileage 
 has grown from a few thousand miles of scat- 
 tered and disconnected links into a great rail- 
 
 119 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 road system of over two hundred and forty 
 thousand miles. 
 
 Every mile of which is in connection with 
 every other mile, equalizing labor conditions 
 and leveling prices throughout the whole coun- 
 try, preventing either local famine or local 
 waste of surplus. This and the reduction dur- 
 ing iliat same period of our railroad rates 
 from three and one-half cents per ton mile to 
 6.9 mills, or less than one-fifth what they were 
 fifty years before, has enabled us to accomplish 
 the greatest miracle that the world has ever 
 seen. 
 
 The whole land area of the earth is 55,000,- 
 000 square miles, and the area of our United 
 States is only a trifle over 3,000,000 square 
 miles, or less than one-eighteenth of the area 
 of the globe. The best statisticians have esti- 
 mated the entire value, or wealth, of the earth 
 at about $550,000,000,000, or in rovmd figiu-es, 
 $10,000,000,000 of value for each million 
 square miles. 
 
 Our proportion of this with our 3,000,000 
 square miles would be $30,000,000,000, but in- 
 stead of the wealth of the United States being 
 $30,000,000,000, or one-eighteenth of the 
 
 117 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 wealth of the world, it is, in fact $130,000,000,- 
 000, or, in other words, our little one-eighteenth 
 of the surface of the globe is worth one-fourth 
 of all the values on earth. I can only suggest 
 what the possession of such wealth means. 
 
 And the thing which makes this true, is the 
 fact that there is no other equal area on the 
 surface of the globe whose remotest acre is so 
 accessible. It is due to the fact that over our 
 one-eighteenth of the earth's surface is distrib- 
 uted one-half of all the railroad mileage on the 
 earth, while the other seventeen-eighteenths of 
 the earth's surface is struggling along with the 
 other half. 
 
 Not only is our national wealth due to our 
 transportation system, but our raUroads are at 
 the foundation of our industrial prosperity, 
 and their cheap rates for transportation are the 
 prime factors in our industrial supremacy, and 
 it is time for American labor to realize it. The 
 less it has cost labor to market its product — the 
 more there has been left for labor to enjoy. 
 
 Where it cost the primitive man a day's la- 
 bor to move freight a single ton-mile we have so 
 developed the science of transportation and so 
 reduced its cost that the cost to us of transport- 
 
 118 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 ing a ton of freight a mile is only about 
 l-SOOths of the value of a day's labor. While 
 the best that England, France or Germany has 
 been able to do is to reduce it to l-60th of the 
 value of a day's labor, A figure approximate- 
 ly equal to the proportion of railroad mileage 
 per capita, a proportion too significant to be 
 anything but conclusive. 
 
 There is no question but that the high stand- 
 ard of American wages and our correspond- 
 ingly high standards of living have been 
 brought about and made possible by our low 
 transportation charges. By the extent, if you 
 please, to which we have reheved labor from the 
 handicap under which it has labored from the 
 beginning of time. 
 
 Buckle has stated : "That civilization is meas- 
 ured by the diffusion of knowledge," but he did 
 not dream how this diffusion would depend 
 upon the development of transportation facili- 
 ties and the means of communication. 
 
 In 1850 there were only 2,500 newspapers 
 published in the whole United States, and 
 these, owing to the difficulty of distribution, 
 did not circulate far from the cities or towns 
 in which they were published. These news- 
 
 119 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 papers made about one for every ten thousand 
 of our population. But in 1910 we had 23,000 
 newspapers published in the United States, or 
 one to every four thousand population, and 
 these, owing to the ease with which they are 
 distributed, have a circulation that reaches into 
 figures almost unbeUevable and unmeaning. 
 
 There are less than 60,000 newspapers pub- 
 lished in the whole world today, and of these 
 forty per cent, are published in the United 
 States. This is nearly three times as many 
 as are published in the whole British Empire; 
 more than three times as many as are pubhshed 
 in the German Empire ; four times as many as 
 are published in France; eight times as many 
 as are published in Austria-Hungary; nine 
 times as many as are published in Italy and 
 more than twenty times as many as are pub- 
 lished in any other coimtry in the world. 
 
 WhUe in the matter of circulation our Amer- 
 ican newspapers and magazines so completely 
 exceed those of the rest of the world that it is 
 estimated today that more than daoty per cent. 
 of all the copies of newspapers and magazines 
 published in the world are printed, circulated 
 and read in the United States of America. 
 
 120 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 I have spent so much time on raih'oads that 
 I can here hut mention the significance in our 
 national life of the telegraph and telephone, 
 both the inventions of Americans. What is 
 true of our supremacy in the railroad world is 
 almost as true in telegraphy. Practically one- 
 half of all the telegraph stations and telegraph 
 business in the world is confined to the hmits 
 of the United States. 
 
 In the world of telephony, our position is 
 nothing less than astounding. Over two-thirds 
 of all the telephone wires on this globe are 
 within the limits of our United States, and over 
 seventy per cent, of all the telephones on earth 
 are used by oin* people. 
 
 The figures — for the year 1913 — show that 
 seventy per cent, of all the automobiles on the 
 earth are in use in our United States. Next to 
 us stands England, France and Germany, in 
 the order named, but New York uses more au- 
 tomobiles than Great Britain; Pennsylvania 
 more than France, and Ohio more than Ger- 
 many. The automobile is really becoming the 
 greatest supplement of our railway service. 
 Newman Erb recently stated: "A few years 
 ago, when farm lands located near the railroad 
 
 121 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 were worth from seventy-five to a hundred dol- 
 lars an acre, land twenty miles back from the 
 railroad could hardly be sold for ten dollars an 
 acre, but with the introduction of the automo- 
 bile this latter land has been brought within a 
 few minutes' rim of the railroads and its value 
 has increased enormously because of this fact. 
 The farmer who owns an automobile and lives 
 twenty miles from a shipping point is today 
 nearer to the markets of the world than the 
 man whose land is three or four miles of the 
 railroad formerly was. The automobile today 
 covers the twenty miles in less time than the 
 horses took to cover three. The use of automo- 
 biles in country distances has within the last 
 five years added over two billion doUars to the 
 value of farm lands alone." 
 
 And it is no mere accident that the first real 
 mechanical conquest of rthe air was accom- 
 plished by two typical American mechanics. 
 
 Yes, the development of transportation fa- 
 ciUties is at the very f oimdation of all material 
 progress. Conmierce and industry wait upon 
 them and prosperity and increase of wealth 
 halt and mark time when their advance ceases. 
 The reward of labor and the field of opportu- 
 
 122 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 nity are dependent upon them. For in the 
 absence of transportation facilities and in the 
 presence of a high cost of transportation, in- 
 dustry languishes, labor finds little to do and 
 wages remain low. While as transportation j6r' 
 duties increase and transportation costs grow < 
 loiver and cheaper, indtistry thrives, markets 
 •widen, commerce grows and wages increase by 
 leaps and bounds. 
 
 Up to this point I have barely suggested 
 that political ideas were dependent for their 
 diffusion upon such means of transportation 
 and communication as existed when and where 
 these ideas first developed. 
 
 In the absence of transportation facilities 
 the religion of Egypt died with its people. 
 .The Turanians carried their civilization as 
 far and wide as their horses could carry them. 
 
 The Greeks had a habit of expelling their 
 advanced thinkers to some more or less remote 
 island, where, with their followers, they might 
 organize a government to suit their own ideas. 
 
 Confucianism remained within the confines 
 of a land whose people regarded it as a sacri- 
 lege to abandon the tombs of their ancestors. 
 Buddhism was carried only as far as its priests 
 
 • 
 
 12S 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 measured their lengths along the dusty roads 
 of the East. 
 
 Mohammedanism swept like a prairie fire 
 around the shores of the Mediterranean, be- 
 cause its followers rode on the swiftest horses 
 that the world has yet produced; tvMle Chris- 
 tianity, driven from its home, crept slowly 
 along the northern shores of the Mediterranean 
 and up into Europe on the weary feet of its 
 early saints. 
 
 The Crusades failed because the Crusaders 
 lacked knowledge of the problem of transport- 
 ing themselves to the Holy Land, or keeping 
 themselves in supplies after they had arrived 
 there. 
 
 It is only now, since the followers of Christ 
 have appropriated the modem means of trans- 
 portation, that they have recalled the ancient 
 injunction to go to the uttermost parts of the 
 earth, and are now turning back to the con- 
 quest of the world. 
 
 Brook Adams, in his Law of Civilization 
 and Decay, says: "That the surest way of 
 measuring the advance towards civilization is 
 by the state of progress of the art of military 
 engineering." But this is only another way 
 
 124 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 of exalting the science of transportation. Mili- 
 tary engineering consists almost entirely of the 
 science of transportation; first, the transport 
 of the armies themselves ; second, the transport 
 and organization of the commissariat; third, 
 the transport of military engines; and fourth, 
 the transport of the material for the construc- 
 tion of defences. 
 
 The armies of the Medes and the Persians 
 almost invariably dissipated and faded away 
 under the difficulties that impeded their ad- 
 vance. The failure of the Persian invasion of 
 Greece was the failure in their system of trans- 
 port. The success of the Romans was due to 
 their mastery of transport, under the then ex- 
 isting conditions. Such success as attended the 
 invasions of AttiUa and Genges Khan was due 
 to their swift riding men and equally swift 
 trains of pack animals. 
 
 The mastery of the Spaniards over the Mex- 
 icans and Indians in their conquest of Mexico 
 and Peru was due quite as much to their pos- 
 session of horses as to their use of firearms. 
 And this was recognized in one of the earliest 
 Spanish laws in relation to the Indians — a law 
 which not only prohibited, but which made it 
 
 126 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 a capital crime to sell a horse to an Indian. 
 
 Read the history of the Napoleonic wars! 
 It will satisfy you that Napoleon's success lay 
 not in any peculiar genius for fighting, but in 
 his engineering ability — ^his mastery of the art 
 of transportation. 
 
 His aphorism that "God is on the side of the 
 heaviest ari;illery" is but another way of ex- 
 pressing the superiority of those who are able 
 to move and transport heavy artillery. And 
 his thought is carried down to the present time 
 in the competitive struggle going on between 
 the nations of the world, to invent and build 
 battleships, not only carrying heavy guns but 
 heavier guns, or, if possible, the heaviest gim, 
 and they measure potency by the superior car- 
 rying power both in weight of metal and dis- 
 tance covered, of the shells belched from their 
 lips. 
 
 Otu" Civil War was, as I have called to your 
 attention, the triumph of superior transporta- 
 tion facilities which gave greater mobility and 
 consequently greater attacking power to the 
 armies of the North. 
 
 The confederation and consolidation of the 
 German States was impossible prior to the de- 
 
 126 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 velopment of German railways. And the real- 
 ization of the German Empire from these Ger- 
 man States has been possible since 1870 only 
 through the growth of the German railway 
 system from less than ten thousand miles to 
 over thirty-six thousand xniles. 
 
 The Russo-Japanese war is the last expres- 
 sion of this same principle. The Russians were 
 conquered not by better soldiers, but by men 
 who were their masters in the art of transport ; 
 and Russia is today bending all her energies 
 not to the creation of a larger army with which 
 to try eventualities with Japan, but to the 
 double-tracking of her Trans-Siberian Rail- 
 road. You may depend upon it that the wars 
 of the future will be determined absolutely by 
 the superior transporting ability of one side 
 over the other.* 
 
 The moral philosophers of the past have as- 
 simied that there was no relation between the 
 material conditions and moral ideals. Lecky 
 even declares that: "The essential qualities of 
 national greatness are moral — ^not material." 
 But he is wrong. There were no morals tmtil 
 
 (Note; *The above was written two years before the out- 
 break of the present World War, but the conduct of it and 
 the probable outcome prove the truth of this statement.) 
 
 127 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 there was something to he moral about. Some 
 theologian has recently called attention to the 
 fact that the primitives labored under no sense 
 of sin. 
 
 Respect for property rights does not come 
 until there is .property to be protected; nor 
 does respect for the person of another come 
 until life itself has some value above mere ex- 
 istence. In the early days, killing was pun- 
 ished only by a fine measured in terms of the 
 food-producing power of the person killed; 
 and respect for the persons and rights of wom- 
 en did not come until women became more than 
 beasts of burden. 
 
 The very fatalism of the Orient is due to the 
 lack of transportation, for how can one escape 
 the pestilence or the famine when one has only 
 his own feet with which to fly therefrom? The 
 condition of the poor in Europe and England 
 before tiie beginning of modem transportation 
 was like that of the poor of India and China 
 — absolutely hopeless. 
 
 The movement in England for better social 
 conditions, the care of the insane, the protection 
 of women and children, did not begin imtil 
 after the building of roads and canals in Eng- 
 
 128 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 land had brought about sufficient travel and 
 inter-communication between the different 
 parts of the Kingdom, to call attention to the 
 fact that different conditions existed and dif- 
 ferent degrees of care were exercised in differ- 
 ent parts of the Kingdom. 
 
 It was only by the development of cheap 
 transportation that cheap food could be 
 brought to the poor, or that the poor could be 
 transported to places where they themselves 
 could better produce their own living. It was 
 not until modern transportation was under 
 way that Robert Dale Owen began to investi- 
 gate the conditions of the laboring classes in 
 Lanarkshire. The demand for higher wages or 
 shorter hours was practically unheard of until 
 the introduction of railroads came to relieve 
 labor from the handicap under which it had 
 previously labored. 
 
 It was not until after the introduction of 
 railways that the first demand was made in 
 America for a ten-hour day. 
 
 Until 1851, sixty-five cents was the average 
 pay per day in the then United States for un- 
 skilled labor. Laborers on the new railroads 
 received seventy-five cents to eighty-seven and 
 
 129 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 one-half cents per day, but the increased de- 
 mand for labor to build railroads which were 
 being projected everywhere, created such a de- 
 mand for railroad laborers that in 1852 the 
 wage on railroad construction was raised to one 
 dollar per day. But the boom of railroad con- 
 struction continued without abatement, so that 
 in' 1853 the railroad laborers, who the year be- 
 fore had been satisfied with the raise to one 
 doUar for a twelve-hour day, struck again and 
 the abandonment of their positions by men 
 working in other occupations to seek employ- 
 ment in the railroad camps resulted in a gen- 
 eral raise in wages for all classes of work. 
 
 The Malthusian theory of population may 
 be true of fixed and immobile populations, but 
 it breaks down in the face of modem cheap 
 transportation, which enables populations to 
 move into better conditions with ease. The 
 hard times of 1837 filled up our Central States. 
 The panic of '73 peopled the trans-Missouri 
 coimtry, while the depression of 1893 poured 
 myriads into the country west of Kansas City 
 and Omaha. 
 
 Every mile of railroad built out into the wil- 
 derness has acted as a safety valve for conges- 
 
 iso 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 ted populations. Behind the brains and cour- 
 age that have built thousands of miles out into 
 the wilderness, where not a human being lived, 
 where not an ounce of traffic was produced, 
 was the faith that when this wilderness was 
 made accessible, the multitudes, filled with 
 courage and hope, would flock into it and de- 
 velop its resources. 
 
 Emancipation from any condition comes to 
 mankind only from an acquaintance with some 
 people somewhere who are free from that con- 
 dition; and this acquaintance has only been 
 gained by travel and observation. 
 
 A new discovery, a new invention, a new 
 idea, spreads only as fast and as far as the 
 means of communication permit, and advance 
 in civihzation has always followed the exist- 
 ing lines of travel and communication. 
 
 The very first effect of travel is to cause the 
 traveler to challenge the reasons for the condi- 
 tions with which he is familiar at home. 
 
 From the beginning of history, commerce 
 • and skepticism have gone hand in hand. No- 
 where has faith or superstition been able to 
 stand against the rise in material wealth that 
 has followed the development of transporta- 
 
 131 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 tion and commerce. 
 
 The centers of theological non-conformity 
 have always been those parts of the world rich- 
 est as the result of their commerce. The de- 
 nial of the Catholic dogma and the rise of the 
 Reformation were due to the development of 
 commerce. The wealthy burghers of the Low 
 Country were the sturdiest advocates of the 
 Reformation. 
 
 The Inquisition in Spain trampled out 
 heresy, but with it, it extinguished also the race 
 of seamen and adventurers that had made 
 Spain dominant in the New World. The Refor- 
 mation in England was not due to the interfer- 
 ence of the Pope with Henry's love affairs, but 
 to the drain on English money caused by the 
 demands of the Pope for Peter's Pence. 
 
 As early as the fourteenth century the Brit- 
 ish Parliament passed a law to prevent money 
 being taken out of England by the religious 
 claims of the Popes of Rome, and it is not un- 
 likely that something of the same kind will oc- 
 cur here when American Catholics realize that, 
 though they have little or no voice in the con- 
 trol of the Church at Rome, their millions of 
 contributions are its chief support. 
 
 132 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 The supreme fact that brought on our 
 American Revolution was not taxation nor lack 
 of representation, but the fact that — that taxa- 
 tion of which they complained was a hindrance 
 to their transportation and communication and 
 laid a handicap upon the trade of the Colonies 
 upon which their prosperity depended. 
 
 Japan's progress in civilization has been en- 
 tirely along material lines. Realizing the im- 
 portance of transportation, Japan has bent 
 every energy towards shipbuilding and the con- 
 trol of commerce, not only in the Pacific but 
 throughout the Orient. Railroads and electric 
 lines are connecting up their cities, factories are 
 multiplying, and wages increasing. Material 
 civilization — that which betters the physical 
 conditions of living — is the one which Japan 
 is absorbing first. The missionaiy propaganda 
 has left them practically untouched, but with 
 increased comfort and physical ease will come 
 leisure for contemplation that shall give to 
 Japanese thinkers and philosophers time to 
 consider the spiritual and ethical significance of 
 the civilization that has done so much for the 
 improvement of their physical condition. 
 
 The same thing is true of China in transition. 
 
 133 
 
THE MEASURE OF 
 
 Her revolution was brought about by the fact 
 that her thousands of students to other coun- 
 tries had become accustomed to higher stand- 
 ards of living and returning to China they were 
 unwilling to drop back to the old standards of 
 living. The material features of our civilization 
 can be seen making progress; but when you 
 know that in China hardly one man in a hxm- 
 dred has ever known what it means to be full, 
 you will realize that until this great race has 
 been fed and relieved from the pangs of hun- 
 ger, until it has been clothed and relieved from 
 the pangs of cold, you cannot expect the Chi- 
 nese people to pay much attention to anything 
 else but the development of transportation and 
 the better distribution of the necessities of life. 
 I think now that you will agree with me that 
 the progress of civilization is marked by the 
 development of the means of transportation; 
 that civilization is measured by the degree with 
 which mankind has surmounted his natural lim- 
 itations in time and space. If civilization 
 means, as I think it does, the emancipation of 
 man from his physical biu'dens, the raising of 
 his standard of living, the blessing of almost 
 universal knowledge and leisure in which to 
 
 134 
 
CIVILIZATION 
 
 appreciate and enjoy the best things on earth, 
 then this country of ours, which has levied upon 
 the world for our necessities — ^this country, in 
 which the luxuries of other climes have become 
 comm.onplace — this country, which has sifted 
 and transformed the world's best thought and 
 made it our own — this country, where wealth 
 is drawing to om- shores the art treasures of 
 the world — this country, where labor's penalty 
 is the lightest and labor's leisure the greatest — 
 this country, in which the science of transporta- 
 tion has reached its highest development — 
 marks the highest stage yet reached in the on- 
 flowing tide of civilization. 
 
 135