re entirely in the hands of voluntary associations, and the
State interferes so far only as to shield individual life and property
from wanton wrong and aggression. Secondly, that the primary purpose of
the Roman Viae was that of extending and securing conquest, while the
primary end of the railroad is to diffuse and facilitate commerce. In
the one case, civilization was a fortunate accident. Gaul imbibed the
arts and manners of Latium, because Gaul had been first subdued, and was
permanently held by the strong Roman arm. But, in the other case,
traffic and communication are the direct objects, while war, if hereafter
wars should arise, will be the crime or the infelicity of those who
engage in it. War indeed, as all ancient history shows, was the normal
condition of Heathendom; Peace, although so often in the past ages rudely
interrupted, is the normal state of Christendom. Again, the Roman road
rendered invasion, encroachment, and the lust of conquest easy to
project, execute, and gratify; whereas the modern Viae, by bringing
nations into speedy and immediate contact with one another, are
diminishing with each year the chances of hostile collision. The Roman
roads, with all their magnificent apparatus of bridges, causeways, of
uplifted hollows and levelled heights, were constructed at an enormous
cost of manual labour and of personal oppression and suffering, and with
comparatively a trifling amount of science. But the railroad is the idea
of the philosopher embodied by the free and cheerfully accorded toil of
the labourer and artizan. When an Appius Claudius or a Marcus Flaminius
determined to mark the year of his consulship or censorship by some
colossal road-work, the husbandman was summoned from his field, the
herdsman was brought from his pasture-ground, a contingent was demanded
from the allies, a conscription was enforced upon the subjects of Rome,
harder task-work was imposed on the slave, and more irksome punishment
inflicted upon the prisoner. {107} The great works of antiquity indeed,
from the pyramids downward to the mausoleum of Hadrian, are too often the
monuments of human toil, privation, and death. But the roads of our more
fortunate times are not cemented with the tears of myriads, nor reared
upon piles of bleached bones. On the contrary, the construction of them
has given employment to thousands who, but for them, would have crowded
to the parish for relief, or have wandered anxiously in sea