ABSTRACT
The gradual improvement, throughout the centuries, of those facilities for internal communication which reached their climax in the creation of the present system of railways has constituted a dominating factor alike in our industrial and in our social advancement as a people. Until transport had provided a ready means alike of collecting raw materials and of distributing food supplies and manufactured articles, industries of the type familiar to United States (US) to-day were practically impossible. Transport and communication by land and water have thus become what Prof. J. Shield Nicholson rightly calls, in his “Principles of Political Economy,” “the bases of industrial organisation ”; and it is to industrial organisation that a country such as ours has been indebted in a pre-eminent degree both for its material prosperity and for the position it occupies to-day among the nations of the world.
