in silence, growing stragglingly in sluggish indifference, content
with coarse food and coarser living.

Such, in general, were the conditions up to 1861. Then came the
storm of shot and shell, the rain of blood, the elemental rage of
passion called the Civil War. There was a total upset of business.
Such periods of hard times as had occurred prior to that time had
been caused by the tinkering of untrained minds with the money
system or by land speculation, and not by lack of access to the
riches of nature. After four years our people awoke, as from a
nightmare, to find the old life swept away forever. In the South,
the Confederates, bitter and sullen, groping amid the ruins of their
institutions, sought to find some substitute for the agricultural
despotism exercised for generations by their slaveholding families.
In the East, the first families of the Revolution, secure in their
preeminence, assumed again the manufacturing-banking-social
prestige. The far West was still almost unknown, and remained in
possession of the buffalo and the Indian. Settlers poured, in
increasing numbers on to the unappropriated lands still left in the
states of the central West, and the center of political power
shifted rapidly to this fertile region.

Already men of keen insight foresaw a time when oil, timber, coal,
and iron must become the stay of a vastly expanding industrial
system, and bent their energies to secure the chief sources of
supply. From the nature of their work the men who built railways
first became aware of the riches of nature, and aided by an enormous
public sympathy with their efforts, monopolized all the natural
opportunities of value. Coupled with industrial development was the
gradual appropriation of the land. The time soon arrived when the