Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/306

296[February 27, 1869] unseen, and suddenly occurring dangers that the "great through trains" must pass to and from Sacramento. The evil can only diminish by the westward tide of empire. Cities and commonwealths must and will grow up all along the line; at first they will be fortifications; they will eventually drive back the savage into the northern wilds of Dakota and Montana, into Texas and upper Mexico.

The rapid growth of the west of America has yet to be realised by Americans themselves, as well as by Europeans. On some days, the emigrant waggons which cross the Missouri River on their way to Colorado, Utah, and Nevada, are counted by thousands. These emigrants rumble with difficulty at the rate of four miles an hour, over those vast plains and ravines; how will it be when steam will waft them there with tenfold swiftness? Chicago has ceased to be called a western city; St. Louis looks around and finds, to her surprise, that people are talking of her as standing on the frontier of the west. Omaha, with her wonderful growth, is already a city with lyceums and insurance houses, and has ten times doubled the price of her land. The results flowing to the commerce of the world, when the Pacific Railroad shall be finally opened for traffic, it is hard to estimate. That it will modify to a large extent the courses between the four continents, there seems little doubt. The route by which the merchants of England—to cite a single example—now carry on the ever increasing trade with China and Japan, is a long and difficult one. By the Suez Canal, the quickest route from England to the Orient, British vessels traverse some fourteen thousand miles; when the Pacific Railroad begins to carry on through traffic, the route viâ New York and San Francisco will not only be shorter, but railway travel being substituted across the American continent for water locomotion, it will be proportionably more rapid. A journey from New York to Yokohama will then occupy about a month, and from London to Yokohama about six weeks! It does not seem improbable that the whole, or nearly the whole, of the great European trade with China, Japan, Australia, and Batavia, will pass by the Pacific Railroad across the American continent, and go, through New York, to London and Havre.

The stimulus which this increased propinquity with civilised nations will give to the hitherto exclusive and self-satisfied races of the Orient, may have results as important in moral and political, as in commercial directions. At San Francisco, there is already a considerable section of the city, exclusively inhabited by emigrant Chinese, called the Chinese quarter; this is but the nucleus of a wide spread and fast increasing Oriental colony. On the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains and the magnificent valleys and spurs of Sierra Nevada, may be found suddenly grown hamlets, villages, towns, of emigrant Chinese; and the tide from the East (it is the West, however, there) which is constantly replenishing these novel settlements of the oldest race on the youngest soil in the world, is constantly increasing in its volume. The Japanese, though more backward, are following the example of their neighbours; the trade between the colonists and the home traders is growing and extending to a cosmopolitan importance. Besides a vast swelling in the current of European and American trade with the Orient, we may readily imagine that the settlement of the Far West on either side of its line will bring to light undiscovered mines of gold and silver, and copper and coal, yet lying in the bosom of untrodden fields, and beneath the sands and pebbles of unknown streams. As it is, the route passes directly through the region of central Colorado, where gold mines of great value are now being worked. In the science of making railway travelling not only comfortable, but luxurious, the Americans have recently made many great strides; and all the latest improvements are to be adopted on the Pacific Railroad line. It is intended, that the traveller shall be provided with every convenience for a week's continuous travel.

If you journey from St. Louis to San Francisco, you will enter the train at St. Louis, and you need not leave it until you can see the Pacific rolling at your feet. You may sleep in luxurious state-rooms, your feet cushioned with the best Brussels carpets, your water service complete, your linen of the finest, your toilet conveniences without a want. By day you will have drawing-rooms, where, on the most yielding of sofas and fauteuils, you may lounge the daylight hours away, over books. When hunger calls, you may repair to a sumptuous salle-à-manger, and at a fixed tariff regale yourself with the choicest viands of the season—especially the rich wild game of the western forests—made yet more palatable by genuine Chateau Margaux or Chablis, or the pure young wines of the California hill sides. No comfort to be found in the best American hotels is to be absent; if you emerge from your carriage at a quiet far western station, it will be rather to admire the primeval landscape, and take a glimpse of the recent settlements, than to gobble down a half cooked dinner in a quarter of the time necessary to its consumption. You will have all the delights of the Atlantic voyage without its distresses; and you may actually write your great work of travel, which is to give Europe new light on the western world, en route. And the expense of travelling thus luxuriously, will be less than it now costs the poor emigrant to make his weary way, across the seemingly boundless plains.

No man can say what colossal fortunes lie along the line of the Pacific Railroad. The speculators are there in thousands already; the prophecies of future cities everywhere meet the eye; the old story will again and again be told, of the lucky few and the beggared many. But bright and high above all, shines the hope, that the products of a