flict was
going on, and was being decided. And it was because slavery was doomed
in the great West, and therefore in the nation, that rebellion ensued.

It is worthy of note that the same generation which witnessed the growth
of the Calhoun school of politics in the South, and of the Free Soil and
(afterward) the Republican party in the North, and which followed with
intense interest the stages of the Territorial struggle, witnessed also
the employment of steam and electricity as agents of human progress.
These agents, these organs of velocity, abbreviating time and space,
said, Let the West be East; and before the locomotive the West fled from
Buffalo to Chicago, across the prairies, the Rocky Mountains, the desert
steppes beyond, and down the Pacific slope, until it stared the Orient
into a self-contradiction.

It was on the part of our government a sublime recognition of the power
of steam, that, while it was struggling for existence, it gave its
sanction to the Pacific Railroad enterprise. Curiously enough, it is
through Kansas and Nebraska--the Epidaurus of our Peloponnesian
war--that the two great rival Pacific Railroad routes are to run.

In the summer of 1861, the project of a trans-continental railway
connecting our Pacific communities with the older population of the East
first assumed a practical aspect. For nearly three decades the nation
had been dreaming of the scheme, but it had done little more than dream.
Almost with the earliest track-laying in America, a visionary New-Yorker
startled a sceptical generation by proclaiming the age of steam, and
pointing at the locomotive as the instrument whereby men should yet
penetrate the mysterious depths of the Far West, and secure for our
growing commerce the prize of Asiatic wealth. Curious readers will find
in the New York Courier and Enquirer of 1837 an article by Dr. Hartley
Carver, advocating a Pacific Railroad; and in view of how little was
known at this time of the country beyond the Alleghanies,--so little,
indeed, that the Territories of the extreme West had no definite
outline, but were measured from the crest of the Rocky Mountains,--the
audacity of the proposition might justly have inspired suspicions of the
sanity of its author. But if Dr. Carver was chimerical, he was at least
courageous in his persistence. Ten years later, this lineal descendant
of old John Carver transferred the question from the arena of newspaper
discussion, and boldly memorial