Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1864 edition. Excerpt: ... Guide-book of the Central railroad of New Jersey, and its connections through the coal-fields of Pennsylvania Harper & Brothers ILLUSTRATED GUIDE-BOOK CENTRAL RAILROAD OF NEW JERSEY. I. INTRODUCTION. The time has gone by when it could be said of any country that its sea-board cities must of necessity hold a monopoly of its grandeur. This is due to railroads, which have relieved inland towns, and even the tiniest villages, from their former servile dependence upon the cities of the coast, and established between the sea and the land a complex universal system of mutual ministration. On this account, there seems to be a decidedly democratic feature about railroads, as indeed there is about every improvement of modern civilization. Metropolitan cities are not made less, but the whole country is brought up to their level. Inland towns and villages already existing have opened up to them a thousand avenues of prosperity from which they must else have been excluded; and, besides this, numbers are tempted into existence, until the country is densely populated with happy communities. In a country so vast as our own, these considerations have an especial weight. Literally it is true that the velocity of steam is imparted to the progressive move ment of this generation. All speed--moral, intellectual, physical--takes its gradation from that which is possible in locomotion; and it must be so. Our three and a quarter millions of acres have only four and a half thousands of miles of coast. Now, as matters were carried-on anciently, it would have taken a thousand years simply to colonize this outer rim of the United States, while the vast interior would have remained thousands of years more in its wilderness state.