Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 July 1886 — Making Them Open Their Eyes. [ARTICLE]

Making Them Open Their Eyes.

European engineers, having recovered their breath, are now engaged in demonstrating the impossibility of our recent railroad feat of changing the varying gauges of southern roads to one uniform standard in a coup'e of days, and some of the journals which have condescended to notice the report of the work pronounce the whole affair a Yankee hoax. Remembering that it took the (Treat Western of England five years to change its few hundred miles of track they are wholly at sea in the contemplation of a proposition to change several thousand miles in sixty hours. “It’s like their Yankee bounce to talk of it, but it cawn’t be done, y’ know.” It certainly was an audacious conception, but the audacity is eclipsed in the accomplishment.

Something {of this incredibility is due, no doubt, to the matter-of-fact, every-day-Bort-of-occuiTPiice treatment which-the undertaking received from our own press. The merest mention was made of the fact that the work was begun at midnight of Saturday, May 81, and was completed during the following Monday. During these two and a half days 12,018 miles of road was changed from all sorts of gauges to one uniform gauge of 4 feet 9 l dies, that being the standard southern gauge except for roads originating in the north and west. This work was done without any perceptible break in the movement of mails,jpassengers, or frei’t, and on Monday night through trains were runjpng with their usual regularity. It is easy to say that the problem was simply one of employing the necessary number of hands. — This, of course, was a necessity, and the surprise of the European engineer may be partly flue to the fact that he has not yet fully mastered the proposition that 100,000 men employed two days are vastly more than 1,000 meu employed 200 days—at least where time is the essence of the undertaking. But in addition to this there w r ere qualities of organization, forethought and alert adaptation of means to ends which are distinctively American characteristics. These are the result not less of the natural environment of broad rivers, inland seas, lofty mountains, and vast distances, than oi the substantial unity of the people. Such an achievement as that in qnestion would be well-nigh impossible in the. same area, with the various nationalities, divers ongues, differing mental conditions, and diverse habits and customs which obtain in continental Europe. It is only a great homogeneous people who can successfully undertake such a stupendous work as this latest railroad feat—a feat that fairly eclipses the engineering triumphs of constructiou which built the Pacific roads at the rate of nearly thirty miles a day.—Chicago News.

Ex-Sheriff John W. Powell has leased the Halloran Livery and Feed Stables, and respectfully solicits a liberal share of the public patronage. Beecher to Gladstone: “That was the best speech I ever heard. ” Gladstone to Beecher: “You are the best judge of a good speech I ever met.” —Chicago Mail, The new display of Goods, selected and bought by such a combination of experience and taste as Mr. and Mrs. Ludd Hopkins may justly claim to have, will certainly sell at the prices offered. — Pezon.theFrenchlion tamer, keeps his money in a box in his lion’s cage. The lion makes a very safe banker when no overfed. • It i<» a notorious fact that Leopold gives greater bargains than any other house in town. Call and examine for yourself. The newest walk is between a wrig* gle and a glide.