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 The Expansion of the United States 363 little dots to represent hundreds of people, each dot a hundred, and stars to represent cities of a hundred thousand people. For two hundred years the reader would see that stippling creeping slowly along the coastal districts and navigable waters, spreading still more gradually into Indiana, Kentucky, and so forth. Then somewhere about 1810 would come a change. Things would get more lively along the river courses. The dots would be multiplying and spreading. That would be the steamboat. The pioneer dots would be spreading soon over Kansas and Nebraska from a number of jumping-off places along the great rivers. Then from about 1830 onward would come the black lines of the railways, and after that the little black dots would not simply creep but run. They would appear now so rapidly, it would be almost as though they were being put on by some sort of spraying machine. And suddenly here and then there would appear the first stars to indicate the first great cities of a hundred thousand people. First one or two and then a multitude of cities — each like a knot in the growing net of the railways. The growth of the United States is a process that has no precedent in the world's history ; it is a new kind of occurrence. Such a com- munity could not have come into existence before, and if it had, without railways it would certainly have dropped to pieces long before now. Without railways or telegraph it would be far easier to ad- minister California from Pekin than from Washington. But this great population of the United States of America has not only grown outrageously ; it has kept uniform. Nay, it has become more uniform. The man of San Francisco is more like the man of New York to-day than the man of Virginia was like the man of New England a century ago. And the process of assimilation goes on unimpeded. The United States is being woven by railway, by telegraph, more and more into one vast unity, speaking, thinking, and acting harmoniously with itself. Soon aviation will be helping in the work. This great community of the United States is an altogether new thing in history. There have been great empires before with popu- lations exceeding 100 millions, but these were associations of diver- gent peoples ; there has never been one single people on this scale before. We want a new term for this new thing. We call the United States a country just as we call France or Holland a country. But the two things are as different as an automobile and a one-horse shay. They are the creations of different periods and different conditions ;