One of the San Francisco papers spoke of there being two of the pastors
of Boston in San Francisco, one of whom, a pastor there for thirty-five
years, had been a hundred and eleven days in coming from New York to
California, while the other, a young man, had been only ten days on his
way. This was true, and it showed what progress had been made within
a life time in the means of intercourse between distant parts of the
country.
It is easy, however, to imagine a state of things in which it would be
a privilege to be a hundred and eleven days on the way from Boston to
San Francisco. If the opportunity of navigation were wholly cut off and
the only way of passing from New York to California should be to be
whirled along in ten days from point to point, men would say, “Alas!
for modern degeneracy. Time was, within the memory of not a few now
living, when it was a luxury to travel. You could take passage in one
of those clippers whose names and exploits now seem fabulous, and the
only memorials of them are paintings and photographs on our parlor
walls, and in books of art; and in those palaces you could sail down
one side of the continent, reach Cape Horn, go five degrees south of it
to make a safe run around the great land mark and pass up on the other
side. Think of the privilege of running through the Straits of Lemaire,
of coming close by the shores of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, of
experiencing those Cape Horn swells, of feeling that you were not far
from Antarctic regions. Those were days when life had some romance
in it. Now you seem to be fired out of a field piece; the next thing
will be to creep into a pneumatic machine, the air will be exhausted
and in a state of suspended consciousness you will wake from your
short delirious dream and will be told that you have been shot eight
thousand miles across the continent. Some like this; annihilate time
and distance and they ask no more; for our part give us the old ways;
steam is good in its place; but we envy those who could be a hundred
and eleven days on the water, passing from the east to the west.”