FUNDAMENTAL CONDITIONS 27 



disbanding of the armies at the close of the war. Not only 

 were a million and a half men, who had for several years been 

 employed by the government, now thrown upon their own 

 resources, but the cessation of those industries which were 

 dependent on the war added many more to the numbers of the 

 unemployed. One writer has estimated that, in 1865, one-fifth 

 of the able-bodied men of the country were in army service, 

 with another fifth employed in furnishing them material and 

 sustenance, and that four million men were thrown out of em- 

 ployment by the ending of the war. 1 Many of these men found 

 their former niche in the industrial world filled by others and 

 went west to make a new start on the frontier; or, if they re- 

 turned to their old occupations, some one else was displaced 

 who might take up the westward march. 



Immigration, too, which had been checked at first by the 

 war, contributed its share to the peopling of the new regions 

 in the West. The number of imigrants had fallen in 1862 to 

 less than ninety thousand, but from that time on it rose steadily 

 until in 1873 ft amounted to four hundred and fifty-nine thou- 

 sand, the highest point reached up to that time. The hard 

 times brought a reaction and the number sank to one hundred 

 and thirty-eight thousand in 1878, only to rise again rapidly 

 to the astounding figure of seven hundred and eighty-eight 

 thousand in i882. 2 That a large number of these immigrants 

 went into the agricultural states of the West can be seen by 

 examining the census statistics of birth and parentage. In 

 1880 the percentage of persons of foreign parentage in Wis- 

 consin was seventy- three ; in Minnesota, seventy-one; in Dakota, 

 sixty-six; in Nebraska, forty-four; and in California, fifty-nine. 



Another factor which helped along the great agricultural 

 expansion in this period was the technical advance, particularly 

 in the line of invention and extended use of agricultural ma- 

 chinery. This development had taken place to a certain extent, 

 in the older settled parts of the country, during the war, partly 



1 Moody, Land and Labor, 149-163. 



2 Emerick, in Political Science Quarterly, xi. 640-643 (September, 1896); Sparks, 

 National Development, ch. ii; Industrial Commission, Reports, xix. 958. 



