Mr. James A. Briggs cites a paragraph from the Boston _Courier_ of
June 27, 1827, then edited by Joseph T. Buckingham, one of the ablest
and most liberal of New England editors. It was but sixty-two years ago
that he thus spoke of the projected railroad from Boston to Albany:
Alcibiades, or some other great man of antiquity, it is said,
cut off his dog’s tail that quidnuncs might not become extinct
from want of excitement. Some such motive, we doubt not,
moves one or two of our natural and experimental philosophers
to get up a project for a railroad from Boston to Albany--a
project which every one knows, who knows the simplest rule in
arithmetic, to be impracticable and at an expense little less
than the market value of the whole territory of Massachusetts;
and which, if practicable, every person of common sense knows
would be as useless as a railroad from Boston to the moon.
The road was built, and there is no more prosperous road in the
country.--_Harper’s Weekly._
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