marines from the Navy Yard guarded the Custom House and the
Sub-Treasury. From Philadelphia to New Orleans, from Boston to
Chicago, came the same story of banks failing, railroads in
bankruptcy, factories closing, idle and hungry throngs moving
restlessly through the streets. In New York 40,000, in Lawrence
3500, in Philadelphia 20,000, were estimated to be out of work.
Labor learned anew that its prosperity was inalienably identified
with the well-being of industry and commerce; and society learned
that hunger and idleness are the golden opportunity of the
demagogue and agitator. The word "socialism" now appears more and
more frequently in the daily press and always a synonym of
destruction or of something to be feared. No sooner had business
revived than the great shadow of internal strife was cast over
the land, and for the duration of the Civil War the peril of the
nation absorbed all the energies of the people.



CHAPTER IV. AMALGAMATION

After Appomattox, every one seemed bent on finding a short cut to
opulence. To foreign observers, the United States was then simply
a scrambling mass of selfish units, for there seemed to be among
the American people no disinterested group to balance accounts
between the competing elements--no leisure class, living on
secured incomes, mellowed by generations of travel, education,
and reflection; no bureaucracy arbitrarily guiding the details of
governmental routine; no aristocracy, born umpires of the doings
of their underlings. All the manifold currents of life seemed
swallowed up in the commercial maelstrom. By the standards of