40 only 8.5 per cent. In 1850
the percentage was 12.5; in 1860, 16.1; in 1870, 20.9; in 1880, 22.5;
and in 1890, 29.2. The year 1880 saw within our borders twenty cities
each with a population of over 100,000; 286 each with over 8,000. In
1890 there were twenty-eight cities each having 100,000 inhabitants or
more, and 448 having 8,000 or more. It was mostly manufacturing and
mechanical industry which thus brought these hordes of human beings
together.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE MARCH OF INDUSTRY

[1869]

We can give but little idea of the advance in industrial artifice and
appliances of all kinds made in the United States in the two decades
after the Civil War. Take it first in textile manufacturing. A century
earlier one person in every family had to work incessantly at spinning
and weaving to keep the whole of them in clothing. Now one day's work a
year per person sufficed for this. The speed of spindles had risen since
1860 from 5,000 to 7,500 revolutions a minute. Looms had gone from 120
picks to 160, and one hand tended from 25 to 50 per cent. more work. The
"slasher" dresser accomplished ten times more than the old machine,
supplying 400 looms in place of forty, and requiring to manage it only
one man and a boy instead of two men and ten girls. A generation earlier
one operative made three yards an hour, now he made ten. In the twenty
years under survey the annual production of cotton mills rose from two
and one-half to three and one-half tons per hand. One man formerly
tended forty spindles, now he tended sixty. In 1890 a single operative
in America could make cotton cloth enough to supply 1,500 persons.

[Illustration: Large ship.]
The American Line Steamship St. Louis, launched from the Cramps Docks,
November 12. 1894. (554 feet long 11,000 tons, and 20,000 horse-power.)

The improvements in woollen, iron, and miscellaneous manufacturing had
perhaps not been quite as great, but were remarkable notwithstanding.
Power and automatic machinery were the order of the day. The Corliss
engine got 23 per cent. more heat and energy from a given amount of coal
than had ever been obtained before it was invented. Instead of the
twenty-five days which the first transatlantic steamer required for the
passage from America to England, many vessels now went from New York to
Liverpool in considerably less than six days, or at an average rate of
more than twenty miles an hour. The speed of passenger trains on the
main ra