OCR Text |
Show THE CONDITIONS OF THE RAILROADS. According as the great transportation lines of the country are prospering, the business industries of the country may be said to be prospering also. The returns of a certain number of the leading roads each week, as the season advances, show more favorably than for the corresponding weeks last year, although the export trade has greatly diminished from its unprecedented proportions then. There are more miles of road on forty lines than there were last year, and this will explain a certain part of ???Unreadable. The real explanation is to be sought in the fact that the business of the interior has developed amazingly of late years, a fact that is well attested by the course of the currency also. For it was the rule until recently, say until last year, for the large sums of money that went out from the Eastern money centers to the West and South to find its way back after a stated time, its service in "moving the crops" having been performed. Now, however, the money thus distributed stays in the section to which it was sent; showing very plainly that it is needed there for the transaction of the increased business to gratify the desire of a large portion of the laboring class for hoarding. The same cause that it exists for the retention of money in the interior also supplies the resources for railway transportation, which now appears in such a promising light in the weekly reports of the roads. It is evident that we fail to entertain, all of us, any proper conception of the vast wealth and resources of the country we call our own. |