The modern railroad system has wrought a double effect upon life in all civilized countries—most of all in England and America—one part of which is more observed than the other: consolidation in towns and cities; but, also, scattering far and wide, and of a very different population, in regions remote from towns. It has collected those once scattered, and scattered those once collected. The first effects upon the country, so far as village life and farm life are concerned, have been strikingly discouraging to the interests of civilization. Thousands of American towns, with an independent life of their own, isolated, trusting to themselves, in need of knowing and honoring native ability and skill in local affairs,—each with its first-rate man of business, its able lawyer, its skilled physician, its honored representative, its truly select-men,—have been pierced to the heart by the railroad which they helped to build to aggrandize their importance. It has gone through them in a double sense—stringing them like beads on a thread to hang round the neck of some proud city. It has annihilated their old importance; broken up the dependence of their farmers upon the home traders; removed the necessity for any first rate professional men in the village; cheapened the state of all village or town offices; destroyed local business and taken out of town the enterprising young men, besides exciting the ambition of those once content with a topical importance, to seek larger spheres of influence. The chief business men step off upon the very rails they originally helped to lay, in order to build up their own community and increase its population and trade, carrying with them all their enterprise, means, and talents to some more inviting field. No woman above the humblest rank now shops for anything over a calico gown in her own village! If a farmer breaks his leg, he sends by telegraph to any city within a hundred miles for a celebrated surgeon to come and set it. If he has an important lawsuit, he engages a city lawyer to prosecute it. Thus every country village extends its wooden sidewalks and its morning stroll to the metropolis, which it now reaches about as speedily by our locomotive facilities as it once reached what used to be called “the Street,” or “the Centre,” or “the Store,” either on foot in the mud, or behind the family Dobbin who floundered more slowly through it.
Henry W. Bellows, “The Townward Tendency,” The City: An Illustrated Magazine 1 (no. 1, January 1872), pg. 38.
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