Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/329

Rh variety of articles. In the former respect, all parts of the earth have been drawn within the circle of exchanges, even those which formerly lay quite outside of such connections, either because they were thinly inhabited or too difficult of access; and the trade resources within civilized lands have been greatly expanded as the improvement of transportation facilities has compensated for the difference between the former cost and the present advance. The quantity of the goods used in trade and the variety are increased, or at least become available for whole classes of consumers, to whom their use was formerly forbidden on account of their price. Our daily life affords abundant examples of such articles. They are exemplified in the variety and prices of our food resources, in the fashions of our clothing, in our architecture, and in the warming and lighting of our houses. Coffee, tea, spices, and other products of the tropics, which were formerly rare among the wealthy, are now set upon the tables of the people, and are objects of general use. The European demand for wheat brings into competition steamers from Northern and Western America, Chili, the states of the La Plata, and India.

In clothing, the moderation of price resulting from the cheapened transportation of the raw materials and the wider distribution of the fabrics come more into view than the introduction of new or hitherto unknown or inaccessible materials, of which jute is the only example we now recollect. That silk, which was formerly a mark of wealth, is now worn by women of only moderate means, and cotton goods, which were articles of luxury a hundred years ago, are made into everybody's shirts and bedclothes, are in no small part due to the cheapness and speed of freight-carriage as well as to the increased facilities for manufacturing them afforded by the introduction of steam machinery.

The improvements which railroads and steamers have made possible in our buildings are also obvious, in the use of solid materials in regions far from the quarries. The coals with which we warm our houses and from which we derive our gas-lights, and the petroleum which burns in the lamps of the man of small means, articles which have become indispensable in modern life, but the use of which was formerly forbidden in all but the narrow regions of their productions, are now carried into the most remote mountain-valleys and across oceans, to wherever men live.

As railways and steamers perform the hard, steady, physical work of trade, so the telegraph assists the mental work of its service. Of the more than a hundred million telegrams which the electric wires carry over the earth yearly, by far the greatest part concern affairs of trade. The telegraph is the medium of all important communications in wholesale trade, and speculation could hardly exist without it. A commercial solidarity covering the whole globe has been built upon it, and the present generation for the first time sees a world-trade.