PRESENT POLITICS 185 



is modern. If the Americans of the first years of the nineteenth century 

 could have called forth an institution like the present Wall Street they 

 would have regarded it as the greatest of blessings. As it was, one of 

 the great accumulating agencies was the national government through 

 its taxing power, especially in the form of customs duties. Besides and 

 resting upon this was the public credit made strong by a ready and 

 vigorous policy of paying public debts. The commonwealths shared 

 this credit in a reflected form because leaders did not discriminate 

 sharply between bonds of the states and obligations of the nation. Under 

 such conditions of need for capital to develop the country economically 

 and to bind it together politically, with an agency for supplying the 

 want subject to popular will, it was inevitable that the people look to the 

 government for aid in the construction of the desired public improve- 

 ments. 



Another resource of well-nigh unlimited extent lay in the hand of 

 the federal government. When the British Crown granted charters to 

 many of the colonies that later became parts of the original union, there 

 was no exact knowledge of the lay of the land or the size of the interior 

 of the continent. The terms of the grants were incompatible. The 

 territories given overspread each other so that a division of the land 

 among the independent states which came out of the revolutionary 

 struggle was impossible. The problem was solved by turning over to 

 the national government practically the whole of the area in question. 

 The nation found itself in possession of a domain imperial in scope and 

 possibilities. 



With public credit and public land subject to the control of a people 

 full of energy and ambition there could be but one result; their use with 

 a lavish hand in furthering the interests of those who were developing 

 the country's resources. Constitutional provisions, the reflection of 

 current theory, limited the functions of government and we evolved a 

 one-sided individualism whose chief tenet was state control in public 

 benefactions to subjects and laissez faire in private use and enjoyment. 

 Every citizen became an actual or potential beneficiary in the distribu- 

 tion of land and the extension of credit. The easy terms of the land 

 laws threw open the widest opportunity for the acquisition of a farm to 

 any one who cared to take it. 



In order to bring these lands within range of the markets good trans- 

 portation was necessary. The failure of the schemes for this purpose in 

 most of the states in the thirties left a free field to corporate enterprise 

 and every effort was made to encourage the construction of the means of 

 carriage by private companies. The federal government gave lands to the 

 states to be passed on to the railroad organizations as a stimulus. Other 

 lands were given direct. The national credit was granted to new enter- 

 prises and second-mortgage bonds taken as security. Immense amounts 



VOL. LXXXI. — 13. 



