nation without losing the spirit of self-help and
democracy.

It is not easy for us to realize to-day how young and primitive was the
United States of 1876. Yet the fact is that we have twice the population
that we had when the telephone was invented. We have twice the wheat
crop and twice as much money in circulation. We have three times the
railways, banks, libraries, newspapers, exports, farm values, and
national wealth. We have ten million farmers who make four times as much
money as seven million farmers made in 1876. We spend four times as
much on our public schools, and we put four times as much in the savings
bank. We have five times as many students in the colleges. And we have
so revolutionized our methods of production that we now produce seven
times as much coal, fourteen times as much oil and pig-iron, twenty-two
times as much copper, and forty-three times as much steel.

There were no skyscrapers in 1876, no trolleys, no electric lights, no
gasoline engines, no self-binders, no bicycles, no automobiles. There
was no Oklahoma, and the combined population of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho,
and Arizona was about equal to that of Des Moines. It was in this
year that General Custer was killed by the Sioux; that the flimsy iron
railway bridge fell at Ashtabula; that the "Molly Maguires" terrorized
Pennsylvania; that the first wire of the Brooklyn Bridge was strung; and
that Boss Tweed and Hell Gate were both put out of the way in New York.

The Great Elm, under which the Revolutionary patriots had met, was still
standing on Boston Common. Daniel Drew, the New York financier, who was
born before the American Constitution was adopted, was still alive; so
were Commodore Vanderbilt, Joseph Henry, A. T. Stewart, Thurlow Weed,
Peter Cooper, Cyrus McCormick, Lucretia Mott, Bryant, Longfellow, and
Emerson. Most old people could remember the running of the first railway
train; people of middle age could remember the sending of the first
telegraph message; and the children in the high schools remembered the
laying of the first Atlantic Cable.

The grandfathers of 1876 were fond of telling how Webster opposed taking
Texas and Oregon into the Union; how George Washington advised against
including the Mississippi River; and how Monroe warned Congress that
a country that reached from the Atlantic to the Middle West was "too
extensive to be governed but by a despotic monarchy." They told how
Abraham Lincoln, when he was postmaster