the
Homestead Act*, which was passed in 1862, and acquire a farm of 160
acres free; or he could secure at almost nominal cost farm-land
which had been given to railways as an inducement to build. Under the
Homestead Act, the Government gave away land amounting to 2,400,000
acres before the close of the war. The Illinois Central alone sold to
actual settlers 221,000 acres in 1863 and 264,000 in 1864. It was during
the war, too, that the great undertaking of the transcontinental railway
was begun, partly for military and partly for commercial reasons. In
this project, both as a field of labor and as a stimulus to Western
settlement, there is also to be found one more device for the relief of
the labor situation in the East.

*This Act, which may be regarded as the culmination of the
long battle of the Northern dreamers to win "land for the
landless," provided that every settler who was, or intended
to be, a citizen might secure 180 acres of government land
by living on it and cultivating it for five years.

There is no more important phenomenon of the time than the shifting of
large masses of population from the East to the West, while the war was
in progress. This fact begins to indicate why there was no shortage in
the agricultural output. The North suffered acutely from inflation of
prices and from a speculative wildness that accompanied the inflation,
but it did not suffer from a lack of those things that are produced by
the soil--food, timber, metals, and coal. In addition to the reason just
mentioned--the search for new occupation by Eastern labor which had
been thrown out of employment--three other causes helped to maintain the
efficiency of work in the mines, in the forests, and on the farms. These
three factors were immigration, the labor of women, and labor-saving
machines.

Immigration, naturally, fell off to a certain degree but it did not
become altogether negligible. It is probable that 110,000 able-bodied
men came into the country while war was in progress--a poor offset
to the many hundred thousand who became soldiers, but nevertheless a
contribution that counted for something.

Vastly more important, in the work of the North, was the part taken by
women. A pathetic detail with which in our own experience the world has
again become familiar was the absence of young men throughout most
of the North, and the presence of women new to the work in many
occupations, especially farm