Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/328

312 the study-rooms of two German scholars, has in fifty years spread out into a network of wires that incloses the earth. The length of the telegraph lines is estimated now at nearly a million kilometres, and the length of the wires at more than double that number. They stop for no obstacles, but find their way over mountains covered with eternal snow, through deserts, and across rivers. Even the sea does not stop them. More than seven hundred submarine cables bear messages over the bottom of the ocean with a speed outstripping that of the thought in which they originated. Hard as it was fifty years ago even approximately to imagine the impending development of the young discoveries and their influence, it is just as hard now to comprehend them in their fullness. The majority of living people take them for granted, and have no further thought about them. Railroads and telegraphs have been so much a matter of course to them from their childhood up that they can hardly conceive that it was ever different. But he whose memory goes back more than a generation, or whoever has traveled in countries where mules or oxen are the only means of transportation, can realize the difference and appreciate the importance of the progress, and the relations that exist between numerous phenomena of life and those concerns.

The most important and evident of these phenomena are the changes which railroads and telegraphs as means of trade have directly impressed on economical affairs; their influences have also made themselves felt, partly as consequences of those changes, in part directly, in transformations of social conditions, and of manners and customs.

It is common to the means of transportation moved by steam and to the telegraph that they effect changes of place, the former of physical objects and men, and the latter of thoughts, with power, speed, and security, immeasurably surpassing those of the formerly known means.

We will first consider the exchange of goods which composes trade. In his latest "Review of the World's Economy," Dr. Van Neumann-Spallart estimates the weight of the goods which the railroads collectively carried in 1882 at about 1,200,000,000 tons; the freight of the steamers was calculated at about half that weight. By far the greater part of these masses of goods have been set in motion by trade in order to place them where they could be made of use. For this reason, the figure of the weight, although the contemplation of it overtaxes our limited powers of conception, gives quite as little idea of the meaning of this enormous movement as does the knowledge of the weight of the blood circulating in the body, with which it is customary to compare this trade, an explanation of the effect of its flow.

The extension of trade may be considered as to space and as to