Our limits will not allow us to follow out this process in its higher complications:  else might we show how the localisation of special industries in special parts of a kingdom, as well as the minute subdivision of labour in the making of each commodity, are similarly determined.  Or, turning to a somewhat different order of illustrations, we might dwell on the multitudinous changes—­material, intellectual, moral—­caused by printing; or the further extensive series of changes wrought by gunpowder.  But leaving the intermediate phases of social development, let us take a few illustrations from its most recent and its passing phases.  To trace the effects of steam-power, in its manifold applications to mining, navigation, and manufactures of all kinds, would carry us into unmanageable detail.  Let us confine ourselves to the latest embodiment of steam-power—­the locomotive engine.

This, as the proximate cause of our railway system, has changed the face of the country, the course of trade, and the habits of the people.  Consider, first, the complicated sets of changes that precede the making of every railway—­the provisional arrangements, the meetings, the registration, the trial section, the parliamentary survey, the lithographed plans, the books of reference, the local deposits and notices, the application to Parliament, the passing Standing-Orders Committee, the first, second, and third readings:  each of which brief heads indicates a multiplicity of transactions, and the development of sundry occupations—­as those of engineers, surveyors, lithographers, parliamentary agents, share-brokers; and the creation of sundry others—­as those of traffic-takers, reference-takers.  Consider, next, the yet more marked changes implied in railway construction—­the cuttings, embankings, tunnellings, diversions of roads; the building of bridges, and stations; the laying down of ballast, sleepers, and rails; the making of engines, tenders, carriages, and waggons:  which processes, acting upon numerous trades, increase the importation of timber, the quarrying of stone, the manufacture of iron, the mining of coal, the burning of bricks:  institute a variety of special manufactures weekly advertised in the Railway Times; and, finally, open the way to sundry new occupations, as those of drivers, stokers, cleaners, plate-layers, etc., etc.  And then consider the changes, more numerous and involved still, which railways in action produce on the community at large.  The organisation of every business is more or less modified:  ease of communication makes it better to do directly what was before done by proxy; agencies are established where previously they would not have paid; goods are obtained from remote wholesale houses instead of near retail ones; and commodities are used which distance once rendered inaccessible.  Again, the rapidity and small cost of carriage tend to specialise more than ever the industries of different districts—­to confine