gay sight was the road in those days, before
steam-engines arose and flung its hostelry and chivalry over. To travel
in coaches, to know coachmen and guards, to be familiar with inns along
the road, to laugh with the jolly hostess in the bar, to chuck the
pretty chamber-maid under the chin, were the delight of men who were
young not very long ago. The road was an institution, the ring was
an institution. Men rallied around them; and, not without a kind of
conservatism expatiated on the benefits with which they endowed the
country, and the evils which would occur when they should be no more
decay of British spirit, decay of manly pluck, ruin of the breed of
horses, and so forth and so forth. To give and take a black eye was
not unusual nor derogatory in a gentleman: to drive a stage-coach the
enjoyment, the emulation, of generous youth. Is there any young fellow
of the present time, who aspires to take the place of a stoker? One
sees occasionally in the country a dismal old drag with a lonely driver.
Where are you, charioteers? Where are you, O rattling Quicksilver, O
swift Defiance? You are passed by racers stronger and swifter than you.
Your lamps are out, and the music of your horns has died away."

Behind this change from the older and more picturesque days which is
thus lamented there lay potent economic forces and a strong commercial
rivalry between different parts of the country. The Atlantic States were
all rivals of each other, reaching out by one bold stroke after another
across forest, mountain, and river to the gigantic and fruitful West.
Step after step the inevitable conquest went on. Foremost in time
marched the sturdy pack-horsemen, blazing the way for the heavier forces
quietly biding their time in the rear--the Conestogas, the steamboat,
the canal boat, and, last and greatest of them all, the locomotive.

Through a long preliminary period the principal center of interest was
the Potomac Valley, towards whose strategic head Virginia and Maryland,
by river-improvement and road-building, were directing their commercial
routes in amiable rivalry for the conquest of the Western trade.
Suddenly out from the southern region of the Middle Atlantic States went
the Cumberland National Road to the Ohio. New York instantly, in her
zone, took up the challenge and thrust her great Erie Canal across to
the Great Lakes. In rapid succession, Pennsylvania and Maryland and
Virginia, eager not to be outdone in winning the