When the telegraph was mentioned, they told how in Revolutionary days the patriots used a system of signalling called "Washington's Tele-graph," consisting of a pole, a flag, a basket, and a barrel.
So, the young Republic was still within hearing distance of its childhood, in 1876.

Both in sentiment and in methods of work it was living close to the log-cabin period.

Many of the old slow ways survived, the ways that were fast enough in the days of the stage-coach and the tinder-box.

There were seventy-seven thousand miles of railway, but poorly built and in short lengths.

There were manufacturing industries that employed two million, four hundred thousand people, but every trade was broken up into a chaos of small competitive units, each at war with all the others.