nds, stocks
and bonds exceeding in value the whole national debt of Hamilton's
day--a debt that strained all the resources of the Federal government in
1790. Such was the financial significance of the railways.

[Illustration: RAILROADS OF THE UNITED STATES IN 1918]

=Growth and Extension of Industry.=--In the field of manufacturing,
mining, and metal working, the results of business enterprise far
outstripped, if measured in mere dollars, the results of railway
construction. By the end of the century there were about ten billion
dollars invested in factories alone and five million wage-earners
employed in them; while the total value of the output, fourteen billion
dollars, was fifteen times the figure for 1860. In the Eastern states
industries multiplied. In the Northwest territory, the old home of
Jacksonian Democracy, they overtopped agriculture. By the end of the
century, Ohio had almost reached and Illinois had surpassed
Massachusetts in the annual value of manufacturing output.

That was not all. Untold wealth in the form of natural resources was
discovered in the South and West. Coal deposits were found in the
Appalachians stretching from Pennsylvania down to Alabama, in Michigan,
in the Mississippi Valley, and in the Western mountains from North
Dakota to New Mexico. In nearly every coal-bearing region, iron was also
discovered and the great fields of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota
soon rivaled those of the Appalachian area. Copper, lead, gold, and
silver in fabulous quantities were unearthed by the restless prospectors
who left no plain or mountain fastness unexplored. Petroleum, first
pumped from the wells of Pennsylvania in the summer of 1859, made new
fortunes equaling those of trade, railways, and land speculation. It
scattered its riches with an especially lavish hand through Oklahoma,
Texas, and California.

=The Trust--an Instrument of Industrial Progress.=--Business enterprise,
under the direction of powerful men working single-handed, or of small
groups of men pooling their capital for one or more undertakings, had
not advanced far before there appeared upon the scene still mightier
leaders of even greater imagination. New constructive genius now brought
together and combined under one management hundreds of concerns or
thousands of miles of railways, revealing the magic strength of
cooeperation on a national scale. Price-cutting in oil, threatening ruin
to those engaged in the industry, as ear