Neither, on the other hand, could the Eastern manufacturer, the New York merchant, or the Northwestern farmer with his wheat and his bacon, command, during the years of warfare, that peculiarly safe Southern market where local competition was forbidden by the limitations of slavery as an industrial system.

But the growth of the commerce between the East and the West was fast making amends for the temporary stoppage of the old commerce between the North and the South. The railroads west of the Mississippi, including those of the Pacific states, had, indeed, but little more than three thousand miles of track in operation, but of the total of thirty-five thousand miles in the whole country all but nine thousand belonged to the states north of the Potomac and west of the Mississippi. From 1860 to 1865 the gain had been about five thousand miles. There had been a considerable increase in the number of locomotives. The Baldwin works alone had turned out ninety-five in 1862, ninety-six in 1863, one hundred and thirty in 1864. The old West was by this time joined to the East by several lines of railroad, and also by the Erie Canal. The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, designed to carry out Washington's plan of connecting the waters of the Potomac and the Ohio, had got no farther than the base of the Alleghenies, which it reached in 1850; and Calhoun's scheme for a railroad to connect Charleston with the West and Northwest had also come to nothing. But by the middle of the century three important railroads, the Baltimore and Ohio, the Pennsylvania, and the New York Central, had passed beyond the Appalachian ridges. Chicago had been reached in 1852. In 1859, the Hannibal and St. Joseph touched the Missouri River.

These early east - and - west railroads were, it is true, not to be compared with the great systems of to-day. The rate of speed was far lower than at present. The tracks, with their iron rails, could not sustain such heavy coaches as are now commonly employed. In 1856, Theo

dore L. Woodruff had patented a nightcar with the essential features of the sleeping-cars now in use, but his idea was not yet so thoroughly developed nor so widely adopted as to render night-travel common. The longest trains were of ten or twelve coaches. The charges for passengers were much higher than at present, the freight charges several times as high. It cost 26.2 cents in 1865 to bring a bushel of wheat from Chicago to New York. The average charge for carrying one ton of freight one mile was 3.31 cents, as against the fraction of a cent per tonmile which is now the usual rate. Nevertheless, inadequate as the means of transportation seem, judged by the standards of a later day, they had already, before the war began, diverted to Eastern markets many products of the West, which in the first half of the century had gone mainly down the rivers to the cotton states and the ports of the Gulf of Mexico. During the war, moreover, the soldiers may be said to have taken the place of the Southern planters as customers of the Western farmer. No doubt, the armies themselves absorbed an energy which would otherwise have gone to the production of wealth in both the sections; but in the North the productive energy left behind the armies was stimulated at once by new demands and by new opportunities. There was, too, a constant reënforcement from other countries. Immigration was more than making good the actual losses in the war. The number of immigrants had, indeed, fallen heavily during the first year, but by the third year the stream had regained its old volume. It continued to gain in 1864, and in 1865 it reached the grand total of 287,397. Of these newcomers, the larger proportion was still drawn from northern and central Europe. The United Kingdom alone contributed nearly 45 per cent, and Germany 34 per cent. The countries of Southern Europe furnished only 1.5 per cent; China and other Asiatic countries, less than 3 per cent. Counting the 7.5 per cent from British North

America, more than nine-tenths of the whole was of the stocks to which the mass of our native population belonged. The productive labor of the North, thus constantly increased from foreign sources, was also reënforced by the entrance of women into various fields of industry, where they have held their places ever since.

The figures show that the industry of the North and West was not misapplied or ineffective. Live stock, for example, had decreased, from the extraordinary consumption of the armies in the field; but sheep had grown no fewer, and the wool crop steadily increased to meet the heavier demand caused by the scarcity of cotton. In 1865, it was actually one third greater than in 1860. This might, of course, be taken as a sign of delay in the westward progress of agriculture, since the shepherd is often merely the forerunner of the farmer; but even in agriculture the coming into general use of the mowing machine, the buggy plow, and other labor-saving devices had largely compensated for the withdrawal of men's hands from the plowshare and the pruninghook to take up the sword. At the London Exhibition of 1862, American mowers surpassed all competition. The war had, it is true, seriously delayed the benefits of the generous homestead law of 1862. From January, 1863, when it went into effect, to the end of 1865, less than three and onehalf millions of acres had been occupied under its provisions, and it was not until the years of peace that the wise bounty of the government became fully effective. But the regions already won to agriculture increased their output of wheat from 170 million bushels (round numbers) in 1860 to 190 millions in 1863. The crops of the next two years showed a falling off, but this was attributable partly to bad weather and partly to the disturbed condition of industry in the border states. The corn crops, though they did not reach the extraordinary level of 1860, showed, after the first drop, a marked and steady rise, and in 1865, an excep

tionally good year for corn, there was a gain of 170 million bushels over 1864.

Even in manufactures, there were gains on many lines to set against such heavy losses as befell the cotton mills and other establishments which were left either without their raw material or without a market. The output of pig iron, for example, which dropped nearly two hundred thousand tons in 1861, had risen by 1863 above the total of 1860, and the next year we were making many thousand tons more than when the war began. In the oil country below Lake Erie a new industry had been created. The output of crude petroleum had grown from half a million barrels in 1860 to nearly two and a half millions in 1865. The gain in woolen manufactures was extraordinary; thousands of garments formerly made of cotton must now, of necessity, be made of wool. There was an increase also in the manufacture of watches and jewelry, of malt liquors, of sewing machines, of hempen products, of paper.

There was a still more remarkable gain in the output of our mines. The story of the great Comstock Lode in Nevada, like the trade between the Union and the Confederate lines, illustrates the persistence of the struggle for wealth, even in the midst of warfare. The Comstock miners, who in 1859 had sent back to civilization only thirty thousand dollars in gold, sent three and a half millions in gold and silver during the first year of the war. In 1864, they contributed sixteen millions to the world's stock of the precious metals. The mines of California were far from exhausted, and Colorado's scarcely touched. The output of gold and silver from the principal mines of the whole country was in round numbers forty-three and one third millions in 1861, sixty-three millions in 1864, seventy millions in 1865. In all, nearly three hundred millions in gold and silver had been mined while the armies were in the field.

What was true of the great industries of agriculture, manufacturing, and mining, the main sources of the power of the

North and of the whole Republic, was true also, if we may trust what evidence we possess, of other industrial activities. In all occupations money wages were high after 1862, but when allowance is made for the inflated state of the currency and the high prices of most commodities, it does not appear that the wage-earning classes had any good reason to think themselves better off than they would have been in peace. There were, however, certain trades and occupations that flourished by reason of the war. In the great cities, and even with the armies in the field, caterers to the immediate wants and to the pleasures of their fellows found their services in great demand. As always in such times, the venders of trifles, the purveyors of light amusements, were thriving. The theatres and music halls of New York were crowded nightly. Companies of barnstormers, some of them not without their struggling histrionic geniuses, followed in the wake of the grand divisions. There was an excellent market for novels and other forms of light literature. Panders to worse appetites than these were likewise stimulated to an extraordinary thrift; for wars and pestilences invariably lessen the sense of responsibility in the weaker sorts of men. Gaming, drunkenness, and licentiousness increased. The worse quarters of our cities, fed with the less desirable of the immigrants, were by this time well recognized factors in municipal politics. The draft riots in New York served, for one thing, to exhibit the foulness and danger which already underlay the city's wealth. Beleaguered Richmond, even in the days when, hope abandoned, the men in the Petersburg trenches came to the very climax of their long devotion, was, according to Southern authorities, a resort for the vilest of mankind; humanity, whose noblest, sublimest aspect was exhibited in that last ditch which Lee's gray "miserables" were set to die in, was at its foulest in the city they defended. There, fortunes were snatched from the wreck and débris of the falling Confederacy, as in the North

larger fortunes were filched by contractors and adventurers from the abundant stores which the industry and sacrifice of patriots on the farms and in the workshops provided for the patriots in the field.

Surprising as it seems, the statistics indicate that the total and the per capita wealth of the North had actually increased during the war. The real and personal property in the loyal states in 1863 was estimated by one authority at nearly 14 billions, as against less than ten and threefourths billions in 1860. The fluctuations of the currency and the meagerness of the data impair the value of the estimate; but the general inference is not improbably correct. The war had retarded, but it of had not stopped, the material progress the North. The pace of our advance was slower, but we did not halt; we did not, on the whole, lose ground.

Nor were the less material activities relinquished. The business of the post office, sometimes taken to gauge the intellectual life of a community, had not declined. The receipts, which were eight and one half millions (round numbers) in 1860, were more than eleven millions in 1863, fourteen and one half millions in 1865. The schools did not close their doors. On the contrary, war, though it loosed the reins to all the viler greeds and appetites, seemed to have stimulated the desire for education among the young. What figures we have concerning the public schools indicate that the number of teachers and scholars in the loyal states had increased, and increased steadily, from 1861 to 1865. As to the colleges their gain was remarkable. from whose four hundred and twenty students in 1861 a good proportion had departed for the battle-fields, enrolled almost twice as many in 1864. The other Eastern colleges, for the most part, also grew. The young universities of Michigan and Wisconsin, scarcely started on their careers in 1861, had in 1864 passed Harvard and Princeton, respectively, in their enrollments. Coeducation, the higher training of women, and the training of

Harvard,

men for the professions, particularly the law, had won in these years a consideration denied to them in less harassed times.

The newspaper press, then, perhaps, a better sign of intellectual life than now, although, judging by our present standard of reportorial enterprise, it made but little of the opportunities the battles gave, had continued to widen its range. The number of newspapers had multiplied rapidly, but the greater journals had more than held their own. The New York Tribune was still easily the most influential of all. In spite of Greeley's unworldliness and his admirable refusal to imitate the methods of Bennett, whose Herald was the forerunner of the merely commercial newspaper enterprises of today, the Tribune had in 1863 a total circulation, daily, semi-weekly, and weekly, of two hundred and fifteen thousand copies; and of this nearly three fourths belonged to the weekly, always the most important means of moulding public opinion. These figures were bettered in 1865. Meanwhile, however, the Herald's circulation had probably grown faster than the Tribune's. The interchange of news and of opinion was easier and fuller than ever before. In that sort of intellectual life there had been a steady pro

gress.

But so much could not be said of literature and the arts. The New England Renaissance, to use the phrase of a recent historian of American letters, was practically ended. Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, and even Bryant, were still alive, still writing; Lowell, indeed, was still to make, in the Commemoration Ode, his best attempt in poetry. But the best work of all these men was, as a rule, finished; and no other writers of comparable gifts succeeded. Lowell's and Whitman's verses, with the Battle Hymn of the Republic, were, in truth, the only poetry inspired by the war at all worthy of the theme. In the conquered South there were no winged minds that could take refuge, as Goethe and Schiller did when France ruled the land and

England the sea, in the kingdom of the air.1

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There had been, however, a great intellectual gain in America from the bitter but successful struggle; a noble use in our adversity. We had gained a better estimate of ourselves, and a juster view of "abroad." The gain was intangible and hard to define, but none the less real and important. It is perhaps best displayed in the proud and swelling music of Lowell's Ode, best explained in his essay On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners." We seemed to have made good somehow, by actual warfare among ourselves, Emerson's earlier declaration of our intellectual independence. It was not merely that we had proved our case as a nation: that Freeman, the English historian, having begun to write a history of Federal government from the formation of the Achaian League " to the disruption of the United States of America," had now to set a different limit to his enterprise. A better sign of our true achievement was the famous retraction of Punch at Lincoln's bier. We could no longer seem, to foreigners or to ourselves, a nation of shop-keepers. By courage and endurance, by a high quarrel, recklessly pursued, we had won a right to partake of whatever nobleness and dignity there was in the world. The test of war, by making us surer of ourselves, had enabled us to take a surer tone with older civilizations. It had given us a better mien and poise, and freed us from provincialism as nothing else could. We had never, it is true, ceased entirely to share in the culture of England. Guided by a few students like Cogswell and Everett and Bancroft, our Eastern colleges had also, several decades before the war, come into touch with German scholarship, doubtless the most potent here of all the intellectual influences that have spread to us from the continent of Europe. But of all these things we were now made free as we had

1 To this statement the finely detached genius of Sidney Lanier is perhaps the only exception.

not been before, because we were ourselves no longer the untried experiment, the unknown quantity, we had been. Intellectually, as well as diplomatically, we stood upright at last, and faced the world.

And we faced it "with a light scorn." If one should attempt to put into a single phrase the attitude of the Republic toward the Powers, Russia alone excepted, this of Lowell's might be the best. To England and France, especially, we turned as a man that has been hard beset, but has come out victorious, turns to the sarcastic spectator who has aided and encouraged the adversary in every way he dared. France had gone far to wipe out the happier memories of former times; England had well nigh justified the unfortunate teaching of our school historians and our Fourth-of-July orators.

The Emperor of the French had seen in our perplexity, our struggle for national existence, nothing better than an opportunity for a trial of that fantastic scheme of a Central American Empire which he had matured in the years of his wanderings and written out while a prisoner at Ham. It was no fault of his that Maximilian, seated on his heaving throne in Mexico, was not already master of all that lay to the south of us, well-nigh to the equator. Napoleon had not even yet relinquished altogether his dream of a great Central American Metropolis, guarding the entrance of that canal which for three hundred years had fascinated such minds as his, and dominating the commerce of two oceans. Our Department of State had wisely forborne to treat Maximilian's invasion of Mexico as the contemptuous infringement of our Monroe Doctrine which it was, but General Grant had recognized the actual situation when, immediately after the surrender of Lee, he ordered the forces in the Southwest to move down to the borders of Mexico. Thus the end of our civil strife disclosed in the Southwest the same old confrontment of Latin and Teuton which American history had exhibited so many times before.

It also set us free for the debate with our kinsmen of the little isle which had run through so much of our history as a nation. There was the dispute over the Northwestern boundary; there was the old dispute about the fisheries; there was, above all, the gathered resentment of the American people at the ill-will and the sneers of England's ruling class throughout the war, the aid and refuge she had given to our domestic foes, the privateers, highwaymen of the seas, built in her ship

yards to prey upon our commerce. The grudge was deep; it was as just as any grudge we ever had against the mother country; and it was aggravated now by a cause that had often set us against our kin. The discontent of Ireland was in one of its periods of intense bitterness. The Fenians, counting, not without their host, upon the sympathy of Americans, were planning violent measures from this country as a base. It was soon known that discharged soldiers from our armies were acting with them, and it was feared that they might at any time pass across the border into Canada and strike there at the power of England. We were no sooner through with our own long quarrel than we were compelled to take account of this persistent old-world feud.

Turning now to the state of our domestic politics at the end of the war, we find it a time of heavy burdens and extraordinary tasks. Great as our energy had been, well-nigh limitless though our material resources had proved to be, the strain of warfare had unquestionably altered, in many grave respects, the working of our government.

The great and rapid increase of expenses had, of course, made it impossible to pay as we went. Expenditures for military purposes had risen steadily from the beginning. At the end, the treasury was paying out not less than five million dollars a day, or, including the interest on the debt, nearly nineteen hundred millions a year. The total money cost of the war, over and above all ordinary charges on the government, is estimated at three and