tator. 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 what happened in this season of
exuberance and intense materialism, the American people were hastily
judged by critics who failed to see that the period was but the prelude
to a maturer national life.

It was a period of a remarkable industrial expansion. Then "plant"
became a new word in the phraseology of the market place, denoting
the enlarged factory or mill and suggesting the hardy perennial, each
succeeding year putting forth new shoots from its side. The products of
this seedtime are seen in the colossal industrial growths of today. Then
it was that short railway lines began to be welded into "systems," that
the railway builders began to strike out into the prairies and mountains
of the West, and that partnerships began to be merged into corporations
and corporations into trusts, ever reaching out for the greater markets.
Meanwhile the inventive genius of America was responding to the call of
the time. In 1877 Bell telephoned from Boston to Salem; two years later,
Brush lighted by electricity the streets of San Francisco. In 1882
Edison was making incandescent electric lights for New York and
operating his first electric car in Menlo Park, New Jersey.

All these developments created a new demand for capital. Where formerly
a manufacturer had made products to order or for a small number of known
customers, now he made on speculation, for a great number of unknown
customers, taking his risks in distant markets. W