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 revolution
 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 introduction
 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 steampacket
 was established on the Hudson, between New York

1 Reports. 1888, xv. 362.