rces, business enterprise, inventive
genius, and the free labor supply of Europe. Unseen by the thoughtless,
unrecorded in the diaries of wiseacres, rarely mentioned in the speeches
of statesmen, there was swiftly rising such a tide in the affairs of
America as Jefferson and Hamilton never dreamed of in their little
philosophies.

=The Inventors.=--Watt and Boulton experimenting with steam in England,
Whitney combining wood and steel into a cotton gin, Fulton and Fitch
applying the steam engine to navigation, Stevens and Peter Cooper trying
out the "iron horse" on "iron highways," Slater building spinning mills
in Pawtucket, Howe attaching the needle to the flying wheel, Morse
spanning a continent with the telegraph, Cyrus Field linking the markets
of the new world with the old along the bed of the Atlantic, McCormick
breaking the sickle under the reaper--these men and a thousand more were
destroying in a mighty revolution of industry the world of the
stagecoach and the tallow candle which Washington and Franklin had
inherited little changed from the age of Caesar. Whitney was to make
cotton king. Watt and Fulton were to make steel and steam masters of the
world. Agriculture was to fall behind in the race for supremacy.

=Industry Outstrips Planting.=--The story of invention, that tribute to
the triumph of mind over matter, fascinating as a romance, need not be
treated in detail here. The effects of invention on social and political
life, multitudinous and never-ending, form the very warp and woof of
American progress from the days of Andrew Jackson to the latest hour.
Neither the great civil conflict--the clash of two systems--nor the
problems of the modern age can be approached without an understanding of
the striking phases of industrialism.

[Illustration: A NEW ENGLAND MILL BUILT IN 1793]

First and foremost among them was the uprush of mills managed by
captains of industry and manned by labor drawn from farms, cities, and
foreign lands. For every planter who cleared a domain in the Southwest
and gathered his army of bondmen about him, there rose in the North a
magician of steam and steel who collected under his roof an army of free
workers.

In seven league boots this new giant strode ahead of the Southern giant.
Between 1850 and 1859, to use dollars and cents as the measure of
progress, the value of domestic manufactures including mines and
fisheries rose from $1,019,106,616 to $1,900,000,000, an increase of