The Electrification of the American Railways

T HIS nation of ours is an experiment in railroading. Whether or not it will succeed is still a question. It takes longer than one century to prove that we have the genius and the self-control to build a nation in the back lands of a continent on a basis of land transport. It takes longer than that to show that it is possible to do so. And yet the very existence of this nation, as we know it, depends on the success of this new thing in nation building. For it is a new thing. Unless we have done it, it has never been done. There have been empires in the past as great in extent as our republic, and greater. But they have not been industrial nations; or if they were, they relied on something that we can never have-waterways leading close to all their centers of population and out into the world. And, of course, there was never any such life as we are trying to maintain in these days of machinery. Ancient Egypt was no such experiment. It was a strip of Nile mud from two to thirty miles wide and 750 miles long, and of about the area of Maryland, with desert on both sides, and opening on waterways at the Mediterranean end and on the Red Sea side; and no part of it was over twenty miles from water transport. It was made up of cities based on the rich silt of the Nile. Its commerce extended all along the shores of the two seas, back into the

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