and annexation. Settlement
had reached the Pacific Ocean, though there were great stretches of
almost uninhabited territory between the settlements on the Pacific and
those just beyond the Mississippi.

The cotton gin had turned the whole South toward the cultivation of
cotton, though some States were better fitted for mixed farming, and
their devotion to cotton meant loss in the end as subsequent events have
proved. The South was not manufacturing any considerable proportion
of the cotton it grew, but the textile industry was flourishing in
New England. A whole series of machines similar to those used in Great
Britain, but not identical, had been invented in America. American mills
paid higher wages than British and in quantity production were far ahead
of the British mills, in proportion to hands employed, which meant being
ahead of the rest of the world.

Wages in America, measured by the world standard, were high, though
as expressed in money, they seem low now. They were conditioned by the
supply of free land, or land that was practically free. The wages paid
were necessarily high enough to attract laborers from the soil which
they might easily own if they chose. There was no fixed laboring class.
The boy or girl in a textile mill often worked only a few years to save
money, buy a farm, or to enter some business or profession.

The steamboat now, wherever there was navigable water, and the railroad,
for a large part of the way, offered transportation to the boundless
West. Steamboats traversed all the larger rivers and the lakes. The
railroad was growing rapidly. Its lines had extended to more than
thirty thousand miles. Construction went on during the war, and the
transcontinental railway was in sight. The locomotive had approached
standardization, and the American railway car was in form similar to
that of the present day, though not so large, so comfortable, or so
strong. The Pullman car, from which has developed the chair car, the
dining car, and the whole list of special cars, was in process of
development, and the automatic air brake of George Westinghouse was soon
to follow.

Thus far had the nation progressed in invention and industry along the
lines of peaceful development. But with the Civil War came a sudden and
tremendous advance. No result of the Civil War, political or social, has
more profoundly affected American life than the application to the farm,
as a war necessity, of machinery on a great