rds was owned by the rural population, and the
value of manufactures was insignificant, compared with the products of
agriculture. One leading aim of American statesmanship and enterprise had
been, from a very early period, to connect the great lakes and the
fertile valleys of the middle and western States with the cities and
ports along the Atlantic seaboard; to improve navigation of the rivers,
and thus bring into cultivation the valuable tracts of country along
their banks; and, as a part of this great work, to connect with each
other, by railways and canals, the towns and villages in the more
densely-peopled and cultivated districts. To carry out the general
design, vast sums were lavished and expensive works constructed, in many
instances far in advance of any ascertained requirements of the country,
and certainly with little prospect of an early return for the
expenditure. But in the meantime the most apparently hopeless of these
works conferred important benefits upon the mass of the community, by
developing sources of wealth which might otherwise have been closed for
years, and providing new spheres for the restless and indomitable energy
of the American.

While the agricultural portion of the American people were extending the
area of their location, and laying under the Constitution new and vast
sources of wealth, the cities and towns also grew apace under the impulse
of commercial and industrial development. No country in the world, Great
Britain not excepted, succeeded more signally in directing its natural
advantages to the promotion of commerce. The abundance of water power was
utilized for manufactures of every description. Machinery of the most
perfect kind was applied to every process, economizing labor,
facilitating locomotion and aiding in surmounting those difficulties
which had ever impeded the progress of young nations. Nowhere was the
gigantic power of steam more abundantly and usefully employed--in the
mine and in the mill, on the rivers and lakes, the canals and the
railroads, doing the work of millions of hands and of human and animal
sinews, without creating a vacuum in the market for labor, or diminishing
the rewards of industry. From 1830 to 1840, a period of only ten years,
the increase in the population of twenty of the largest cities in the
United States, from New York to St. Louis inclusive, was fifty-five per
cent, and this in face of the most disastrous commercial panic that had
ever v