nd homeless women and
children crowded the country highways. No such disorders followed the
Civil War in this country, at least in the North and West. Spiritually
the struggle accomplished much in awakening the nation to a
consciousness of its great opportunities. The fact that we could
spend more than a million dollars a day--expenditures that hardly seem
startling in amount now, but which were almost unprecedented then--and
that soon after hostilities ceased we rapidly paid off our large debt,
directed the attention of foreign capitalists to our resources, and gave
them the utmost confidence in this new investment field. Immigration,
too, started after the war at a rate hitherto without parallel in our
annals. The Germans who had come in the years preceding the Civil War
had been largely political refugees and democratic idealists, but now,
in much larger numbers, began the influx of north and south Germans
whose dominating motive was economic. These Germans began to find their
way to the farms of the Mississippi Valley; the Irish began once more
to crowd our cities; the Slavs gravitated towards the mines of
Pennsylvania; the Scandinavians settled whole counties of certain
northwestern States; while the Jews began that conquest of the tailoring
industries that was ultimately to make them the clothiers of a hundred
million people. For this industrial development, America supplied the
land, the resources, and the business leaders, while Europe furnished
the liquid capital and the laborers.

Even more directly did the War stimulate our industrial development.
Perhaps the greatest effect was the way in which it changed our
transportation system. The mere necessity of constantly transporting
hundreds of thousands of troops and war supplies demanded reconstruction
and reequipment on an extensive scale. The American Civil War was the
first great conflict in which railroads played a conspicuous military
part, and their development during those four years naturally left them
in a strong position to meet the new necessities of peace. One of
the first effects of the War was to close the Mississippi River;
consequently the products of the Western farms had to go east by
railroad, and this fact led to that preeminence of the great trunk lines
which they retain to this day. Almost overnight Chicago became the great
Western shipping center, and though the river boats lingered for a
time on the Ohio and the Mississippi they grew fewe