314 LAISSEZ FAIRE A.D. 1776 —1850. stimulus to the material prosperity of the country as a whole; but there are districts which have profited little, if at all, by the change, while the increase of wealth in the progressive centres has been unexampled. Great as was the impulse which was given to economic progress by the building of railways in England, the revolu- tion they effected in other lands was even more remarkable. Distances in Great Britain are comparatively short, and the obstacles to internal communication by road, or water, are not insuperable ; railways only served for the most part to improve specially existing lines of traffic. In America the conditions were after the . . . ‘ 7 4 system was entirely different; railways rendered it possible to establish Jeradutel direct connection between the Eastern and the Middle dmerica. States; the great plains, beyond the Alleghanics, which had been dependent for all their traffic on the Ohio, the Tennessee and the Mississippi, now found means of direct access to the Atlantic coast, and the railways have enabled successive generations of pioneers to push farther and farther West. Steam traction shows itself at its best in hauling freight over great distances; it is under those circumstances that the full convenience of the railway system comes out most clearly. The United States had begun to supply this country with cereals to some extent, before and during the Napoleonic War, but it has only been as a consequence of the intro- duction of railways that the English farmer is regularly and ordinarily exposed to competition with the wheat growers of the most fertile regions of the West. The development of the railway system in America has done much to deprive the tanded classes in England of the natural protection, which was afforded by distance and difficulty of transport®. The application of steam power to shipping has had somewhat similar results. At first it was introduced in connection with internal communications in canals. The Charlotte Dundas was the first steam-tug that ever plied; in 1803 she was at work on the Forth and Clyde Canal. A more ambitious attempt was successfully carried out in America in 1807, when regular communication by steam- packet was established on the Hudson, between New York 1 Reports. 1888, xv. 362.