This soon taught him the second advantage of
sea-power, which is, that, as a rule, you can carry goods very much
better by water than land. Even now, if you want to move many big and
heavy things a thousand miles you can nearly always do it ten times
better in a ship than in a train, and ten times better in a train than
by carts and horses on the very best of roads. Of course a raft is a
poor, slow, clumsy sort of ship; no ship at all, in fact. But when
rafts were the only "ships" in the world there certainly were no trains
and nothing like one of our good roads. The water has always had the
same advantage over the land; for as horses, trails, carts, roads, and
trains began to be used on land, so canoes, boats, sailing ships, and
steamers began to be used on water. Anybody can prove the truth of the
rule for himself by seeing how much easier it is to paddle a hundred
pounds ten miles in a canoe than to carry the same weight one mile over
a portage.
Presently the smarter men wanted something better than a little log
raft nosing its slow way along through dead shallow water when shoved
by a pole; so they put a third and longer log between the other two,
with its front end sticking out and turning up a little.
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