At a banquet in Paris attended by Americans in celebration of the late
Fourth of July, Mr. Walker’s speech in reply to the toast of the material
prosperity of the United States and France, and the establishment of
closer commercial relations between them, was especially striking and
interesting. He remarked, “In 1870 the cost of transporting food and
merchandise between the Western and Eastern States was from a
cent-and-a-half to two cents a ton a mile. I well remember a
conversation which I had in 1870 or 1871 with Mr. William B. Ogden, of
Chicago, one of the modest railway kings of that primitive period. In a
vein of sanguine prophecy, Mr. Ogden exclaimed to me, ‘Mr. Walker, you
will live to see freight brought from Chicago to New York at a cent a ton
a mile!’ ‘Perhaps so,’ I replied; ‘but I fear this result will not be
reached in my time.’ In 1877 or 1878 the cost had fallen to
three-eighths of a cent a ton a mile, and although this price was not
remunerative, I was told by one of the highest authorities in railway
matters that five-eighths of a cent would be perfectly satisfactory. The
effect of this reduction in the cost of transportation is precisely as
though the unexhaustible grain fields and pastures across the Mississippi
had been moved bodily eastward to the longitude of Ohio and Western New
York. It is estimated that it takes a quarter of a ton of bread and meat
to feed a grown man in Massachusetts for a year. The bread and meat come
to him from the far west, and I have no doubt that it will astonish you
to be told, as it lately astonished me, that a single day of this man’s
labour, even if it be of the commonest sort, will pay for transporting
his year’s subsistence for a thousand miles.”