CHAPTER XIII. 



THE EXHAUSTION OF THE PUBLIC LANDS. 



Thomas Carlyle once said to an American: " Ye may 

 boast o' yer dimocracy, or any ither 'cracy, or any kind 

 o' poleetical roobish ; but the reason why yer laboring 

 folk are so happy is thot ye have a vost deal o' land for 

 a verra feiv peopled Carlyle was not the man to take an 

 unprejudiced view of republican institutions ; but he was 

 not mistaken in finding great significance in the fact 

 that heretofore our land has been vastly greater than its 

 population. The rapid accumulation of our wealth, our 

 comparative immunity from the consequences of un- 

 scientific legislation, our financial elasticity, our high 

 wages, the general welfare and contentment of the peo- 

 ple hitherto have all been due, in very large measure, to 

 an abundance of cheap land. When the supply is ex- 

 hausted, we shall enter upon a new era, and shall more 

 rapidly approximate European conditions of life. The 

 gravity of the change was clearly foreseen by Lord Mac- 

 aulay, and expressed in his well-known letter to Hon. H. 

 S. Randall, in 1857— a letter which General Garfield said 

 startled him " hke an alarm bell in the night." " Your 

 fate," says Macaulay, " I believe to be certain, though it 

 is deferred by a physical cause. As long as you have a 

 boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied land, your 

 laboring population will be far more at ease than the la- 

 boring population of the Old World. . . . But the time 

 will come when New England will be as thickly peopled 

 as Old England. Wages will be as low, and will fluctu- 

 ate as much with you as with us. You will have your 

 Manchesters and Birminghams. And in those Manches- 

 ters and Birminghams, hundreds of thousands of artisana 



