The Paths of Inland Commerce

ii Copyright, 1920
by Yale University Press

If the great American novel is ever written,I hazard the guess that its plot will be woven around the theme of American transportation, for that has been the vital factor in the national development of the United States. Every problem in the building of the Republic has been, in the last analysis, a problem in transportation. The author of such a novel will find a rich fund of material in the perpetual rivalries of pack-horseman and wagoner, of riverman and canal boatman, of steamboat promoter and railway capitalist. He will find at every point the old jostling and challenging the new: pack-horsemen demolishing wagons in the early days of the Alleghany traffic; wagoners deriding Clinton's Ditch; angry boatmen anxious to ram the paddle wheels of Fulton'sClermont, which threatened their monopoly. Such opposition hasalways been an incident of progress; and even in this new country,receptive as it was to new ideas, the Washingtons, the Fitches, theFultons, the Coopers, andviiithe Whitneys, who saw visions and dreamed dreams, all had to facescepticism and hostility from those whom they would serve.

A. B. H.

Worcester, Mass.,

June, 1919.

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