Читать книгу In an Unknown Prison Land. An account of convicts and colonists in New Caledonia with jottings out and home онлайн

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“When you get to San Francisco you will find that the total cost works out at about three cents a mile, say three halfpence. I believe the legal first-class fare in England—without sleeping-accommodation, in fact without anything you have here except a place to sit down in—is threepence a mile.”

I didn’t make the calculation, because when we subsequently exchanged cards I found I was talking to the President of the Mercantile Transportation Company, a man who knows just about as much of travel by land and sea as there is to be learnt.

After this we got on to railroading generally. I learnt much, and in the learning thereof came to think even less of British railway methods than I had done before. I learnt why it was cheaper to carry grain a thousand miles from Chicago to New York than it is to carry it a couple of hundred miles from Yorkshire to London; why cattle can be carried over thousands of miles of prairie at less cost than over hundreds of miles of English railroads; and many other things all bearing on the question of the dollar and how to save it—for your true American is just as keen on saving as he is lavish in spending—which I thought might well be taught and still better learnt on this side.