Excerpt from A Congressional History of Railways in the United States, Vol. 2: The Railway in Congress: 1850 1887 The period covered by the present work extends from 1850 to 1887, from the beginning of the rapid growth of railway systems to the Interstate Commerce Act. In but a little more than a generation there was tremendous expansion in railways, in society, in social consciousness, and in government. Nor mally, the aid aspect became smaller and smaller, dwindling to a sort of negative aid which a railway receives when the friction of political machinery retards or prevents the hostile working of social conscience or public Opinion; and regulation grew, chang ing from a negative disburdening of commerce from private restrictions to a. More positive control. The demand for rail ways had become more qualitative. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.