The Weekly Register

A Deadwood Example.
A short telegram from Deadwood in our dispatches of yesterday, reported a meeting of citizens of the Black Hills for the purpose of petitioning Congress for the privilege of assessing all their property to the extent of ten per cent of its valuation as a subscription toward building a railroad.
There is a real inspiration in this little dispatch. There is a smack of business about it that we relish. There is a revelation in it of Western character that tells the whole secret of Western growth and progress.
This little population up there in the Black Hills are of the kind that are willing to sacrifice all the comforts and conveniences of civilization for the mighty dollar, but they know what to do with it when they get it. They know how to put it where it will do the most good. They don't want any government bonds at 3 and 4 per cent. They don't tie up their money in old stockings. They have no moss on their backs or rust on their small change.
They are men who calculate the cost of a railroad enterprise as carefully as any other people in any other locality. They don't build railroads in the Black Hills for a trifle. But while they know the cost, they also are far-seeing enough to estimate the returns. They are ready to risk their last dollar in any reasonable project which gives them odds in favor of an increased return. Isolation means to them as it does to any other people in this age, years of toil always at a disadvantage for very meager profits. A railroad brings with it more people, more money, more of the appliances of civilization, and an infinite opportunity to every individual inhabitant of bettering his condition just in proportion to his capacity to use these opportunities.
Deadwood is willing to take the risk. And herein is the whole secret of fortune and growth in any community or private enterprise. "Nothing venture nothing have," is the law of business and money making in all its ramifications. Risk goes hand in hand with gain. Risk is the prime condition of any measure of profit. The man of nerve in business is the successful man. The community that will pool their issues and stake their money and pull together in a common cause is the growing community. The individual moss-backs who will conduct a business only on a margin of safety broader than their business, and the kickers in a community who always erect the danger signal over every public project that involves expense, are the dead weights to the world's progress and their own prosperity.
It is true that all public enterprises involving large outlays of money, demand and should receive careful consideration and due caution, but when a community or an individual is blinded by a dime of expense to a dollar of gain, he has reached the condition where only retrogression is the rule and progress impossible.
It strikes us that there is a lesson in this Deadwood example that many localities in West Virginia may ponder with profit. The isolation of which so many localities of our State complain is not so much the result of necessity as of lack of nerve. They are unwilling to take the risk-to pay the price of relief. Lack of money and lack of population are very formidable obstacles to building railroads, but lack of courage and liberality in a people are greater ones.
We have in mind several localities in this State that have all the means within their reach necessary to secure ample railroad facilities, but they won't risk it. They won't pay the price. They won't spend a dime till they have a dollar for security. We ought to have a railroad stretching through the interior counties of the State and carrying our natural resources to connection with the great Pennsylvania system of roads, and thus distributing them all over the country, and these counties are amply able to secure the road, but they won't. Their population is diminishing instead of increasing, and their natural wealth is languishing without any return or profit to anybody, but these people will see it rot rather than have it taxed into market. These are plain facts plainly told, which do not appear to advantage in contrast with the Deadwood example we have instanced.-Register.