immediate ancestors. Our nation of 1865 was a nation of farmers,
city artisans, and industrious, independent business men, and
small-scale manufacturers. Millionaires, though they were not
unknown, did not swarm all over the land. Luxury, though it had
made great progress in the latter years of the war, had not
become the American standard of well-being. The industrial story
of the United States in the last fifty years is the story of the
most amazing economic transformation that the world has ever
known; a change which is fitly typified in the evolution of the
independent oil driller of western Pennsylvania into the Standard
Oil Company, and of the ancient open air forge on the banks of
the Allegheny into the United States Steel Corporation.

The slow, unceasing ages had been accumulating a priceless
inheritance for the American people. Nearly all of their natural
resources, in 1865, were still lying fallow, and even
undiscovered in many instances. Americans had begun, it is true,
to exploit their more obvious, external wealth, their forests and
their land; the first had made them one of the world's two
greatest shipbuilding nations, while the second had furnished a
large part of the resources that had enabled the Federal
Government to fight what was, up to that time, the greatest war
in history. But the extensive prairie plains whose settlement was
to follow the railroad extensions of the sixties and the
seventies--Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Oklahoma, Minnesota, the
Dakotas--had been only slightly penetrated. This region, with a
rainfall not too abundant and not too scanty, with a cultivable
soil extending from eight inches to twenty feet under the ground,
with hardly a rock in its whole extent, with scarcely a tree,
except where it bordered on the streams, has been pronounced by