combination of the important railroad systems and steamship lines,
in concert with these same forces, even the breadstuffs and the
manufactures of the nation are to some degree controlled in a similar
way. This is largely the work of the last decade. The development of the
greatest iron mines of Lake Superior occurred in the early nineties, and
in the same decade came the combination by which the coal and the coke
of the country, and the transportation systems that connect them with
the iron mines, have been brought under a few concentrated managements.
Side by side with this concentration of capital has gone the combination
of labor in the same vast industries. The one is in a certain sense the
concomitant of the other, but the movement acquires an additional
significance because of the fact that during the past fifteen years the
labor class has been so recruited by a tide of foreign immigration that
this class is now largely made up of persons of foreign parentage, and
the lines of cleavage which begin to appear in this country between
capital and labor have been accentuated by distinctions of nationality.

A third phenomenon connected with the two just mentioned is the
expansion of the United States politically and commercially into lands
beyond the seas. A cycle of American development has been completed. Up
to the close of the War of 1812, this country was involved in the
fortunes of the European state system. The first quarter of a century of
our national existence was almost a continual struggle to prevent
ourselves being drawn into the European wars. At the close of that era
of conflict, the United States set its face toward the West. It began
the settlement and improvement of the vast interior of the country. Here
was the field of our colonization, here the field of our political
activity. This process being completed, it is not strange that we find
the United States again involved in world-politics. The revolution that
occurred four years ago, when the United States struck down that ancient
nation under whose auspices the New World was discovered, is hardly yet
more than dimly understood. The insular wreckage of the Spanish War,
Porto Rico and the Philippines, with the problems presented by the
Hawaiian Islands, Cuba, the Isthmian Canal, and China, all are
indications of the new direction of the ship of state, and while we thus
turn our attention overseas, our concentrated industrial strength has
given us a str