CHAPTER II 



PKESENT CONDITIONS 



UP to the Civil War and for some years after, our people 

 were almost wholly agricultural. National activity con- 

 tented itself with settling and developing the vast areas of 

 the public lands, whose virgin richness cried aloud in the 

 wilderness for men. 



The policy of the government, framed to stimulate 

 rapid occupation of the public lands, had attracted hordes 

 of settlers over the mountains from the older states, and im- 

 migration flowed in a steady stream into the valleys of the 

 Ohio and the Mississippi. 



A system had grown up in the South almost patriarchal, 

 based upon cultivation by slave labor of enormous areas de- 

 voted exclusively to cotton. In the North, New England 

 had developed some few centers of industry, drawing their 

 support from the manufacture of the great Southern staple. 

 New York, Boston, and Philadelphia were growing as outlets 

 for foreign commerce, but as yet manufacturing flourished 

 but feebly and in few localities. 



Such manufacturing and commercial enterprises as existed 

 had been laboriously built up by long years of honest work- 

 ing. The free lands of the government, by giving laborers 

 an alternative, kept up wages, forcing employers to bid 

 against each other for labor; and monopoly thus being 

 checked, individual equality was possible. 



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