mposition of the labor class and its relation to
wages and to the native American employer have been deeply influenced
thereby; the sympathy of the employers with labor has been unfavorably
affected by the pressure of great numbers of immigrants of alien
nationality and of lower standards of life.

The familiar facts of the massing of population in the cities and the
contemporaneous increase of urban power, and of the massing of capital
and production in fewer and vastly greater industrial units, especially
attest the revolution. "It is a proposition too plain to require
elucidation," wrote Richard Rush, Secretary of the Treasury, in his
report of 1827, "that the creation of capital is retarded rather than
accelerated by the diffusion of a thin population over a great surface
of soil."[317:1] Thirty years before Rush wrote these words Albert
Gallatin declared in Congress that "if the cause of the happiness of
this country were examined into, it would be found to arise as much from
the great plenty of land in proportion to the inhabitants which their
citizens enjoyed as from the wisdom of their political institutions."
Possibly both of these Pennsylvania financiers were right under the
conditions of the time; but it is at least significant that capital and
labor entered upon a new era as the end of the free lands approached. A
contemporary of Gallatin in Congress had replied to the argument that
cheap lands would depopulate the Atlantic coast by saying that if a law
were framed to prevent ready access to western lands it would be
tantamount to saying that there is some class which must remain "and by
law be obliged to serve the others for such wages as they pleased to
give." The passage of the arable public domain into private possession
has raised this question in a new form and has brought forth new
answers. This is peculiarly the era when competitive individualism in
the midst of vast unappropriated opportunities changed into the
monopoly of the fundamental industrial processes by huge aggregations of
capital as the free lands disappeared. All the tendencies of the
large-scale production of the twentieth century, all the trend to the
massing of capital in large combinations, all of the energies of the age
of steam, found in America exceptional freedom of action and were
offered regions of activity equal to the states of all Western Europe.
Here they reached their highest development.

The decade following 1897 is mar