eighty-six per cent in ten years. In this same period the total
production of naval stores, rice, sugar, tobacco, and cotton, the
staples of the South, went only from $165,000,000, in round figures, to
$204,000,000. At the halfway point of the century, the capital invested
in industry, commerce, and cities far exceeded the value of all the farm
land between the Atlantic and the Pacific; thus the course of economy
had been reversed in fifty years. Tested by figures of production, King
Cotton had shriveled by 1860 to a petty prince in comparison, for each
year the captains of industry turned out goods worth nearly twenty times
all the bales of cotton picked on Southern plantations. Iron, boots and
shoes, and leather goods pouring from Northern mills surpassed in value
the entire cotton output.

=The Agrarian West Turns to Industry.=--Nor was this vast enterprise
confined to the old Northeast where, as Madison had sagely remarked,
commerce was early dominant. "Cincinnati," runs an official report in
1854, "appears to be a great central depot for ready-made clothing and
its manufacture for the Western markets may be said to be one of the
great trades of that city." There, wrote another traveler, "I heard the
crack of the cattle driver's whip and the hum of the factory: the West
and the East meeting." Louisville and St. Louis were already famous for
their clothing trades and the manufacture of cotton bagging. Five
hundred of the two thousand woolen mills in the country in 1860 were in
the Western states. Of the output of flour and grist mills, which almost
reached in value the cotton crop of 1850, the Ohio Valley furnished a
rapidly growing share. The old home of Jacksonian democracy, where
Federalists had been almost as scarce as monarchists, turned slowly
backward, as the needle to the pole, toward the principle of protection
for domestic industry, espoused by Hamilton and defended by Clay.

=The Extension of Canals and Railways.=--As necessary to mechanical
industry as steel and steam power was the great market, spread over a
wide and diversified area and knit together by efficient means of
transportation. This service was supplied to industry by the steamship,
which began its career on the Hudson in 1807; by the canals, of which
the Erie opened in 1825 was the most noteworthy; and by the railways,
which came into practical operation about 1830.

[Illustration: _From an old print_

AN EARLY RAILWAY]

With sure inst