Contemplate for a moment the mentality that saw railroads as bad because they allowed people to move to their destinations so quickly that they didn’t need to stop at taverns on the way. What about the towns and taverns that would spring up along the destinations that the railroad brought people to? They did spring up, and many people during Johnson’s time foresaw that they would. This, from a man who as a fugitive from his apprenticeship had to walk thirty, sometimes seventy miles to get places, and whose family
