Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/730

 698 The years after the war. [iseo- grazing facilities, and the exploitation of the mineral resources, of the Rocky Mountains and the arid plains ; the transformation of the Pacific slope from a series of mining camps to an important source of agricultural and forest supplies ; the expansion of eastern industry in response to the discovery of the new resources, to a continuous series of inventions, and to the increasing market ; the recovery of prosperity in the South, and the adoption of a more diversified industry under a system of free labour these were the causes which operated during the thirty years after the Civil War to bind all sections of the country together with the bonds of mutual commercial interest. On the other hand, the new era was to be marked by the appearance of problems from which hitherto the young democracy had been com- paratively free, and the freedom from which had formed a favourite theme for patriotic oratory. The same material causes which were to obliterate the lines of geographical cleavage contained the elements which were to increase the cleavage of social classes. The growth of industry meant the establishment of a wage-earning class, whose members were to lose more and more the possibility of escape from a dependent position through the freedom of the soil, which had been the strength of the earlier artisan. The aggregation of capital necessary to the new methods of exploiting the national resources necessitated the concentra- tion of power in fewer hands. The time had come when the unorganised activities of an industrious people had found their limit ; and the capacity to forecast the future had become more important than the mere industry of the present. No matter how important the energy and intelligence of the masses, no matter how rapidly their own comforts increased, they seemed to themselves to have lost the independent initiative of their fathers, as the organised march of progress was more and more directed by the great captains of industry. These feelings, however, were not of a kind to lessen the intenser feelings of nationality which accompanied the change to the larger scale of economic life. The country bulked bigger to all sections and classes ; enterprises hitherto considered magni- ficent now became ordinary; and the confidence in the future, which encouraged the spirit of daring speculative enterprise, was at the same time the common possession and the common pride of a whole people. The change of scale in popular conceptions was quickly seen in the financial transactions of the government. The strict economy and cautious tariff policy of the ante bellum period were no longer to be enforced by a public sensitive, through inherited prejudice, to every increase of taxation. Accustomed to the vast system of excise and customs taxes of the war period, the people were not likely to prove too exacting provided that the most burdensome internal taxes were quickly removed, while there was easy tolerance of a scale of public expenditure which offered every inducement to the looting of the public treasury, and the consequent demoralisation of politics. In some measure this spirit