The region of the world that displayed the most immediate and striking results from the new inventions in transport was North America. Politically, the United States embodied, and its constitution crystallized, the liberal ideas of the mid-eighteenth century. It dispensed with state-church or crown, it would have no titles, it protected property jealously as a method of freedom, and it gave nearly every adult male citizen a vote. Its method of voting was crude, and therefore its political life soon fell, but that did not prevent the newly emancipated population from developing an energy, enterprise, and public spirit far beyond that of any other contemporary population. Then came that acceleration of locomotion. It is a curious thing that America, which owes most to this acceleration in locomotion, has felt it least. The United States has taken the railway, the river steamboat, the telegraph, and so forth as though they were a natural part of their growth. They were not. These things happened to come along just in time to save American unity. The United States of today was made first by the river steamboat, and then by the railway. Without these things, the present United States would have been altogether impossible. The westward flow of population would have been far more sluggish. It might never have crossed the great central plains. The first state established beyond the river was the steamboat state of Missouri in 1821. But the rest of the distance to the Pacific was done in a few decades.
If we had the resources then, it would be interesting to show a map of North America year by year from 1600 onward, with little dots to represent hundreds of people, each dot a hundred, and stars to represent cities of a hundred thousand people.
For two hundred years, the reader would see the little dots creeping slowly along the coastal districts and navigable waters, spreading still more gradually into Indiana, Kentucky, and so forth. Then somewhere about 1810 would come a change. Things would get more lively along the river courses. The dots would be multiplying and spreading. That would be the steamboat.
Then from about 1850 onward would come the black lines of the railways, and after that the little black dots would not simply creep but run. Then suddenly here and then there would appear the first stars to indicate the first great cities of a hundred thousand people. First one or two and then a multitude of cities—each like a knot in the growing net of the railways.
The growth of the United States is a process that has no precedent in the world's history; it is a new kind of occurrence. Such a community could not have come into existence before, and if it had, without railways it would certainly have dropped to pieces long before now. Without railways or telegraph, it would be far easier to administer California from Pekin than from Washington. But this great population of the United States of America has not only grown outrageously; it has kept uniform. Nay, it has become more uniform. The man of San Francisco is more like the man of New York today than the man of Virginia was like the man of New England a century ago. The United States is being woven by railway, by telegraph, more and more into one vast unity, speaking, thinking, and acting harmoniously with itself. Soon aviation will be helping in the work.