Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/458

442 was the one thing which was absolutely essential to make them finally possible; inasmuch as the cost of frequently replacing rails of iron would have entailed such a burden of expenditure as to have rendered the present cheapness of railway transportation utterly unattainable. And it is most interesting to note how rapidly improvements in processes have followed the discovery of Bessemer, until, on the score of relative first cost alone, it has become economical to substitute steel for iron in railroad construction. In 1873 Bessemer steel in England, where its price has not been enhanced by protective duties, commanded $80 per ton; in 1886 it was profitably manufactured and sold in the same country for less than $20 per ton! "Within the same time the annual producing capacity of a Bessemer converter has been increased fourfold, with no increase but rather a diminution of the involved labor; and by the Gilchrist-Thomas process, four men can now make a given product of steel in the same time and with less cost of material than it took ten men ten years ago to accomplish. A ton of steel rails can now also be made with 5,000 pounds of coal, as compared with 10,000 pounds in 1868.

One of the most momentous and what may be called humanitarian results of the recent great extension and cheapening of the world's railway system and service is, that there is now no longer any occasion for the people of any country indulging in either excessive hopes or fears as to the results of any particular harvest; inasmuch as the failure of crops in any one country is no longer, as it was, no later than twenty years ago, identical with high prices of grain; the prices of cereals being at present regulated, not within any particular country, but by the combined production and comsumption of all countries made mutually accessible by railroads and steamships. Hence it is that, since 1870, years of locally bad crops in Europe have generally witnessed considerably lower prices than years when the local crops were good, and there was a local surplus for export.

In short, one marked effect of the present railroad and steamship system of transportation has been to compel a uniformity of prices for all commodities that are essential to life, and to put an end forever to what, less than half a century ago, was a constant feature of commerce, namely, the existence of local markets, with widely divergent prices for such commodities. How much of misery and starvation a locally deficient harvest entailed under the old system upon the poorer classes, through the absence of opportunity of supplying the deficiency