I
remember him well; he worked for Rhodes.... Hullo! Here's Simpson at
it again; since when did they buy _him_?..." And so forth. I lead
my pastoral life, happy in the general world about me, and I serve,
as sauce to such healthy meat, the piquant wickedness of the town;
nor do I ever note a cowardice, a lie, a bribery, or a breach of
trust, a surrender in the field, or a new Peerage, but I remember
that my newspaper could not add these refining influences to my life
but for the _railway_ which I set out to praise at the beginning of
this and intend to praise manfully to the end.
Yet another good we owe to railways occurs to me. They keep the
small towns going.
Don't pester me with "economics" on that point; I know more
economics than you, and I say that but for the railways the small
towns would have gone to pieces. There never yet was a civilisation
growing richer and improving its high roads in which the small towns
did not dwindle. The village supplied the local market with bodily
necessaries; the intellectual life, the civic necessities had to go
into the large towns. It happened in the second and third centuries
in Italy; it happened in France between Henri IV and the Revolution;
it was happening here before 1830.
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