Note 18 — EIGHTH CONGRESS.—SECOND SESSION.

Roads, rivers, canals—their construction or improvement so long the vexed question of Federal power, have been superseded as national questions by the progress of science, and the force of individual enterprise. Railroads have put an end to that question, and with it, all the old maxims of preparing for war in time. They are the largest, cheapest, and most effective preparation for war, that the world ever saw, being the realization of the whole art of war; to wit: The concentration in the shortest time of the greatest number of troops. By these roads the United States would throw millions of citizen soldiers, if needed, on any one point in a very few days.