It is a population of an extremely
modern type. Urban concentration has already gone far with it; fifteen
millions of it are crowded into and about twenty great cities, another
eighteen millions make up five hundred towns. Between these centres of
population run railways indeed, telegraph wires, telephone connections,
tracks of various sorts, but to the European eye these are mere
scratchings on a virgin surface. An empty wilderness manifests itself
through this thin network of human conveniences, appears in the meshes
even at the railroad side.
Essentially, America is still an unsettled land, with only a few
incidental good roads in favoured places, with no universal police, with
no wayside inns where a civilised man may rest, with still only the
crudest of rural postal deliveries, with long stretches of swamp and
forest and desert by the track side, still unassailed by industry. This
much one sees clearly enough eastward of Chicago. Westward it becomes
more and more the fact. In Idaho, at last, comes the untouched and
perhaps invincible desert, plain and continuous through the long hours
of travel. Huge areas do not contain one human being to the square mile,
still vaster portions fall short of two....
It is upon Pennsylvania and New York State and the belt of great towns
that stretches out past Chicago to Milwaukee and Madison that the nation
centres and seems destined to centre.
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