"As soon as we were freed from the necessity of preying upon one another,
we found that there was no hurry. The good work would wait to be well
done; and one of the earliest effects of the Evolution was the disuse of
the swift trains which had traversed the continent, night and day, that
one man might overreach another, or make haste to undersell his rival, or
seize some advantage of him, or plot some profit to his loss. Nine-tenths
of the railroads, which in the old times had ruinously competed, and then,
in the hands of the Accumulation, had been united to impoverish and
oppress the people, fell into disuse. The commonwealth operated the few
lines that were necessary for the collection of materials and the
distribution of manufactures, and for pleasure travel and the affairs of
state; but the roads that had been built to invest capital, or parallel
other roads, or 'make work,' as it was called, or to develop resources,
or boom localities, were suffered to fall into ruin; the rails were
stripped from the landscape, which they had bound as with shackles, and
the road-beds became highways for the use of kindly neighborhoods, or
nature recovered them wholly and hid the memory of their former abuse in
grass and flowers and wild vines.
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