PHILIPPINE ISLANDS AND AMERICAN CAPITAL. 187 



fear unless we inflict upon ourselves a similar burden. We have 

 succeeded by attending to our own industries, by developing our 

 natural resources, by producing things that the people of other na- 

 tions must have. That development is but begun. Even England, 

 the ruler of the greatest colonial empire the world has ever known, 

 the greatest manufacturing nation, the mistress of the seas, stands 

 with almost stationary exports. The United States, the nation with 

 a small navy, the'nation that never really had a colony, the so-called 

 isolated nation, has come by rapid strides to the point where she is the 

 leading exporter of the world. 



There is no reason why the progress of the United States should 

 be checked. England has demonstrated the fact that the nation that 

 has the iron and coal is the commercial mistress of the world. The 

 TJnited States is continuing, and will continue the demonstration. 

 England has but 900 square miles of much-used coal lands, and 

 she gets her iron ore from Spain. We have over 200,000 square 

 miles* of untouched coal lands; an almost continuous bed of iron 

 ore, reaching from Lake Ontario to Alabama, f Beside this great 

 ore bed is the x\ppalachian coal field, with coal mines in every State 

 between N'ew York and Alabama. There are mountains of iron ore 

 in Missouri and Michigan. By the special lines of lake steamers the 

 iron ore of Lake Superior is taken to Chicago and Cleveland, and 

 thence carried by rail to Pittsburg. There the eastern coal com- 

 pletes the conditions for the most economical production of iron and 

 steel. That gives the L^nited States the basis for our export trade 

 in iron, steel, and machinery. We are capturing the iron markets 

 of the world, and, judging by our supplies, can hold them for ages. 

 As our iron and coal are the basis of all manufacturing industry, 

 continued attention to them will give us the control of the world's 

 trade. 



There are many other lines of our internal development that 

 are yet barely begim. Irrigation*' is an example of this. The report 

 of John W. Noble, Secretary of the Interior for 1891, said, " One hun- 

 dred and twenty million acres that are now desert may be redeemed 

 by irrigation so as to produce the cereals, fruits, and garden products 

 possible in the climate where the lands are located." That is an 

 area nearly twice as large as the Philippine Islands, and it is open 

 to the American settler, while there is an indication that the Philip- 

 pines may be inaccessible on account of their climate. Moreover, 



* The last United States census puts our coal lands at something more than 225,000 

 square miles. 



+ " This deposit occurs as far north as the southern shores of Lake Ontario, and thence 

 extends in an almost continuous manner through Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and 

 Tennessee to central Alabama." — N. S. Shaler's The United States of America, vol. i, p. 432. 



