lively, even a frenzied, outburst of industrial, commercial, and speculative activity followed hard upon the restoration of peace.  This activity and its effects have been the most important fact in American life during the forty years which have supervened; and it has assumed very different characteristics from those which it had assumed previous to the War.  We must now consider the circumstances, the consequences, and the meaning of this economic revolution.

Although nobody in 1870 suspected it, the United States was entering upon a new phase of its economic career; and the new economy was bringing with it radical social changes.  Even before the outbreak of the Civil War the rich and fertile states of the Middle West had become well populated.  They had passed from an almost exclusively agricultural economy to one which was much more largely urban and industrial.  The farms had become well-equipped; large cities were being built up; factories of various kinds were being established; and most important of all, the whole industrial organization of the country was being adjusted to transportation by means of the railroad.  An industrial community, which was, comparatively speaking, well-organized and well-furnished with machinery, was taking the place of the agricultural community of 1830-1840, which was incoherent and scattered and which lacked everything except energy and opportunity.  Such an increase of organization, capital, and equipment necessarily modified the outlook and interests of the people of the Middle West.  While still retaining many of their local traits, their point of view had been approaching in certain respects that of the inhabitants of the East.  They had ceased to be pioneers.

During the two decades after the Civil War, the territory, which was still in the early stage of agricultural development, was the first and second tier of states west of the Mississippi River.  Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, and finally the Dakotas were being opened for settlement; but in their case the effect and symptoms of this condition were not the same as they had been with the earlier pioneer states.  Their economy was from the beginning adjusted to the railroad; and the railroad had made an essential difference.  It worked in favor of a more comprehensive and definite organization and a more complete equipment.  While the business interests of the new states were and still are predominantly agricultural, the railroads had transformed the occupation of farming.  After 1870, the pioneer farmer was much less dependent than he had been upon local conditions and markets, and upon the unaided exertions of himself and his neighbors.  He bought and sold in the markets of the world.  He needed more capital and more machinery.  He had to borrow money and make shrewd business calculations.  From every standpoint his economic environment had become more complicated and more extended, and his success depended much more upon conditions which were