A road-bed from New York to San Francisco, with
stations, bridges, and crossings of the kind that the London and
Northwestern owns from London to Glasgow, would cost a sum large enough
to support the German army for a term of years. The whole way is
constructed with the care that inspired the creators of some of our now
obsolete forts along the Atlantic coast.
An American engineer, with his knowledge of the difficulties he had to
encounter--the wide rivers with variable banks, the mountain chains,
perhaps the long spaces of absolute desert; in fact, all the
perplexities of a vast and somewhat new country--would not dare spend a
respectable portion of his allowance on seventy feet of granite wall
over a gully, when he knew he could make an embankment with little cost
by heaving up the dirt and stones from here and there. But the English
road is all made in the pattern by which the Romans built their
highways. After England is dead, savants will find narrow streaks of
masonry leading from ruin to ruin. Of course this does not always seem
convincingly admirable. It sometimes resembles energy poured into a rat-
hole. There is a vale between expediency and the convenience of
posterity, a mid-ground which enables men surely to benefit the
hereafter people by valiantly advancing the present; and the point is
that, if some laborers live in unhealthy tenements in Cornwall, one is
likely to view with incomplete satisfaction the record of long and
patient labor and thought displayed by an eight-foot drain for a
nonexistent, impossible rivulet in the North.
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