=The Inventors.=—­Watt and Boulton experimenting with steam in England, Whitney combining wood and steel into a cotton gin, Fulton and Fitch applying the steam engine to navigation, Stevens and Peter Cooper trying out the “iron horse” on “iron highways,” Slater building spinning mills in Pawtucket, Howe attaching the needle to the flying wheel, Morse spanning a continent with the telegraph, Cyrus Field linking the markets of the new world with the old along the bed of the Atlantic, McCormick breaking the sickle under the reaper—­these men and a thousand more were destroying in a mighty revolution of industry the world of the stagecoach and the tallow candle which Washington and Franklin had inherited little changed from the age of Caesar.  Whitney was to make cotton king.  Watt and Fulton were to make steel and steam masters of the world.  Agriculture was to fall behind in the race for supremacy.

=Industry Outstrips Planting.=—­The story of invention, that tribute to the triumph of mind over matter, fascinating as a romance, need not be treated in detail here.  The effects of invention on social and political life, multitudinous and never-ending, form the very warp and woof of American progress from the days of Andrew Jackson to the latest hour.  Neither the great civil conflict—­the clash of two systems—­nor the problems of the modern age can be approached without an understanding of the striking phases of industrialism.

[Illustration:  A NEW ENGLAND MILL BUILT IN 1793]

First and foremost among them was the uprush of mills managed by captains of industry and manned by labor drawn from farms, cities, and foreign lands.  For every planter who cleared a domain in the Southwest and gathered his army of bondmen about him, there rose in the North a magician of steam and steel who collected under his roof an army of free workers.

In seven league boots this new giant strode ahead of the Southern giant.  Between 1850 and 1859, to use dollars and cents as the measure of progress, the value of domestic manufactures including mines and fisheries rose from $1,019,106,616 to $1,900,000,000, an increase of eighty-six per cent in ten years.  In this same period the total production of naval stores, rice, sugar, tobacco, and cotton, the staples of the South, went only from $165,000,000, in round figures, to $204,000,000.  At the halfway point of the century, the capital invested in industry, commerce, and cities far exceeded the value of all the farm land between the Atlantic and the Pacific; thus the course of economy had been reversed in fifty years.  Tested by figures of production, King Cotton had shriveled by 1860 to a petty prince in comparison, for each year the captains of industry turned out goods worth nearly twenty times all the bales of cotton picked on Southern plantations.  Iron, boots and shoes, and leather goods pouring from Northern mills surpassed in value the entire cotton output.