Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/332

316 derived principally from its effects on social conditions, civilization, and customs. One of the most important of these effects is illustrated in emigration, which has assumed grand dimensions under the operation of the new methods of communication. Of the twelve and a half million emigrants who went to the United States between the recognition of their independence and 1883, not more than a million belong to the time previous to the establishment of regular passenger communication by steamer with Europe, about 1844. As a result of the establishment of this method of communication, and of the building of the railroads that opened the Mississippi Valley and the western part of the continent, emigration assumed colossal proportions. Besides the amelioration of the voyage, which has become an affair of not more than ten or twelve days for emigrant-vessels, the improved fare, the cheaper rate of passage, and the punctuality and increased safety of the transit, may be marked as circumstances contributing to this result.

The difficulties of the land-journey were formerly hardly less formidable to emigrants seeking the interior of the country than were those of the sea-voyage. Weeks and even months might be spent in reaching the end of the journey, while the traveler had to do without everything he could not take along with him, or else to procure it at the expense of great trouble and cost. Now the railroad carries one from the port of arrival, in as many days as months were formerly required, to the extreme West; and, finding himself there, he is no longer lost in the wilderness, with nothing but his own efforts to depend upon; but he has a railroad passing at no very great distance, to keep him in constant communication with civilization. To these great impulses may be added the increased facilities for coming and going within their own country. Formerly the poor man was tied to his threshold by the impossibility of obtaining the means to get away. Now, at an expense of time and money relatively trifling, he is able to go and seek other places where he may find better fields for the exercise of his powers and easier conditions of existence. In this way the condition of the poorer and the laboring classes has been immeasurably altered. Hence we see a streaming of working-men toward the centers of great industries, large towns growing up, labor become scarce in the agricultural districts, and the industrial organizations undergoing a revolution. The labor market has undergone the same kind of extension as the market for goods; and skilled labor has become more and more a thing of merchandise, the price of which is regulated by the larger conjunctures of business. The personal relation between laborer and employer, which formerly, at least in handicraft work, had somewhat the aspect of a family relation, has been dissolved or relaxed.

We have also to speak of the services which the post has rendered. They are by no means limited to the economical field, but they are