and we wondered at this unanticipated
success. To-day, thanks to Porter and Allen, to Hartnell, to Hoadley,
to Sims, to Thomson, to Sweet, to Ide, and to Ball, we have seen the
speed fluctuation restricted to even less than one per cent. of its
normal average.
The inventors of the steam engine are, through their representatives
of to-day, according to the statisticians, doing the equivalent of
twelve times the work of a horse, for every man, woman and child on
the globe. We have not less, probably, than a half million of miles of
railway, transporting something over 150,000,000,000 of tons a mile a
year. A horse is reckoned to haul a ton weight about six and a half
miles, day by day, by the year together. In the United States, it is
reckoned that the steam engine, on the railways alone, hauls a
thousand tons one mile, for every inhabitant of the country, every
year, or, if it is preferred to so state it, a ton a thousand miles.
This is the way in which the East and the West are, by the inventors
of the steam engine, enabled to help each other. This costs about $10
each individual; it would require some 25 millions of horses to do the
work, and would cost about $1,000 a family, which is more than twice
the average family earnings.
Dr. Strong, in that remarkable book, "Our Country," says: "One man, by
the aid of steam, is able to do the work which required two hundred
and fifty men at the beginning of the century.
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