Excerpt from Address Delivered by Mr. James J. Hill Before the Kansas City, Mo., Commercial Club: November 19, 1907 The transportation facilities of the whole country are and have been unequal to its present needs. They must be made equal to the burdens they bear or the country cannot prosper. The inter nal growth of the United States, in population, in manufactures, in agricultural production, is unparalleled. Every item makes more business for the common carrier. Your splendid city, with its re markable commercial development, furnishes one case in point. The entire section tributary to you is growing to-day as rapidly as any other portion of the country. To the south you behold the rise of a new commonwealth, having a population at its admission as great as that of Minnesota after forty years of statehood, entitled on its admission to five members of Congress, where only a few years ago was the distant border of frontier settlement. The rise of the new, the expansion of the old commonwealth, are both reflect ed in the statistics of the railway business of the nation. How far railroad construction has been unable to keep pace with domestic commerce the country even now does not realize. A few figures will help to make clear this significant and alarming fact. 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.